Improve student “tracking” don’t eliminate it

The goal should be to push more kids into more challenging work

I’m the parent of an elementary school-aged child, so a subject that I hear a lot of arguing about in real life is the idea of “tracking” (or “detracking”) in public school systems. And listening to these conversations over the years, I’ve noticed three things about how people talk about this stuff.

One is that participants in these arguments seem to have very little consensus as to what it is exactly that they mean by tracking. The United States is a large country with such a decentralized school system that there is no canonical practice of tracking or detracking.

The second is that gut reactions to these ideas are very heavily influenced by framing. I witnessed a discussion about education issues recently in which one person said that it would help a certain set of schools if they were to introduce “advanced coursework.” Lots of people seemed to like that idea. But then someone else said oh no, she’s really talking about tracking, which provoked a turn against it. The original speaker countered that absolutely not, there would be no tracking at all, it’s just that there would be some coursework that was more advanced that students could enroll in if they wanted. Then, the conversation moved on to other things. Personally, I was inclined to agree with both the speaker who proposed the advanced coursework and with the speaker who said the advanced coursework amounted to tracking. But what do I know? Words can mean different things to different people, and the woman wasn’t offering a super-detailed proposal.

The third thing is that two (bad) leftist notions hang over this whole conversation like a dark cloud.

One is a gut-level hostility to any form of testing or assessment. If you believe that standardized testing is per se racist, you’re going to struggle with any system that attempts to sort students, since sorting without a standardized test opens the door to extremely high levels of bias. The other is a kind of dogmatic racialism which insists that anything you do has to create perfect demographic balance relative to the underlying population. School quality matters, and it matters most for poor kids. But it doesn’t matter so much that schools are capable of creating a situation in which quality schooling perfectly equalizes outcomes regardless of background conditions —because those background conditions matter even more. That’s an absurd standard to set for egalitarian policy.

What schools should aim for is a policy that raises everyone up to a reasonable baseline level and that allows all students to thrive, including making sure that academically talented kids from poor or otherwise disadvantaged backgrounds don’t get lost in the shuffle. That means looking for systems that improve on the potential blindspots of a program of differentiated instruction, not systems that abandon the idea.

You can’t treat everyone the same

Anne-Helen Peterson published a piece recently titled “The Case for Detracking” that I think exemplifies some of the ways this discourse tends to go awry.

First, Peterson writes about her own background:

I was a very bored kid for most of school and craved any sort of tracking. Fantasized about it. The one day a week I did get it in elementary school — a well-intentioned but faulty afternoon Gifted and Talented program — felt precious beyond measure. So as an adult, I’ve spent a lot of time unlearning the understanding that “untracked” means “unchallenging for me.”

Given how sensitive people are to framing, I think the traditional decision in the United States to characterize certain academic programs as being for “gifted and talented” children has been borderline catastrophic. Imagine you were given a random group of 200 American teenagers and were told you need to organize them into eight different Spanish classes. Absolutely nobody would decide that the smart way to do this is to divide them up by age. Some of them would be fluent Spanish speakers and some of them would speak no Spanish at all. Others would have learned some rudimentary Spanish in school but not speak it very well. You would want to assess their Spanish language ability and slot them into the appropriate class.

And you definitely wouldn’t put a shiny “gifted” label on the fluent Spanish speakers and tell the world that the beginners are stupid. Lots of smart people don’t speak Spanish! And just because they don’t currently doesn’t mean they can’t learn to!

It is true that, to the best of my understanding, some people really do have a gift for learning languages. Humans are equal in the eyes of God and in the eyes of the law, not in our capabilities or our skills. But from an instructional point of view, the thing you need to do here is assess students’ Spanish language skills, not their “giftedness.” And, of course, precisely because the point here is not to designate certain people as “gifted,” there is no upside to being misclassified into an inappropriately advanced foreign language class. It’s better for everyone to have the right material be taught to the right students, which I think emerges clearly if you can avoid toxic framing.

My son’s cohort was in kindergarten for the bulk of the pandemic school closures, so we’ve known lots of kids who struggled in first and second grade learning to read. And something I’ve noticed among my peers it that every parent whose struggling reader was offered extra help and support from the school welcomed it.

But if the school had instead assessed all the kids and decided those in the top half were “gifted” and the others were dummies, then there would obviously have been enormous backlash. The fact is, though, they did do an assessment and then they assigned different instructional programs to different kids based in part on the results of that assessment. It really wasn’t “tracking” (and I don’t see any reason to track second graders), but even in totally non-tracked classrooms, they have various pull-outs and push-ins and specialized support. Which is just important to put on the table because, on some level, I think everyone recognizes the need for differentiated instruction. It just becomes a question of how you organize it.

Leveling up or leveling down

Peterson’s piece is built around an interview with anti-tracking expert Margaret Thornton, who pretty clearly does believe that kids need differentiated instruction. What she’s talking about is finding ways to deliver that differentiated instruction inside a singular classroom.