June 11, 2000

CHILDREN ARE THE CASUALTIES IN EDUCATION 'TRACKING WARS'

The theory that mingling children of widely varying abilities in ''heterogeneous'' classrooms will help them learn more belongs to the class of notions so silly that only intellectuals can believe them.

By the middle school years, children have spread themselves out over a wide range of accomplishment. Some are not yet fully independent readers, while others have moved on to grown-up books.

The best math students of middle-school age can finish a demanding high-school curriculum by the end of eighth grade. Johns Hopkins University runs such a program, with sites around the country; my son was in one at the University of Minnesota. But many other students have such limited skills that they need to spend their middle-school school years on what they didn't learn in elementary school. On Colorado's first statewide math test, given to fifth-graders last fall, 53 percent scored below ''proficient.'' They're not going to be starting algebra in sixth grade.

No teacher, no matter how dedicated or experienced, can meet the needs of all the students in a class spanning the full spectrum of ability.

One familiar and generally effective solution is to group children by ability, in homogeneous classes, a policy also called ''tracking.''

But effective education is not the highest priority among theorists of education. For some 20 years, and especially since the 1985 publication of an influential book, Keeping Track, by Jeannie Oakes, the orthodox view has been that tracking is bad for children. Oakes writes that she hopes her book ''will make clear how tracking may inhibit the learning of many of our county's teenagers -especially those who are poor and nonwhite.''

In The Tracking Wars: State Reform Meets School Policy, published by the Brookings Institution, Tom Loveless examines how Oakes' views came to dominate state policy, especially in California and Massachusetts middle schools, and how individual schools and districts reacted. Loveless, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, calls detracking ''a gamble'' whose risks are disproportionately borne by society's most disadvantaged children.

''Detracking is taking place in low-achieving schools, in poor schools, and in urban areas . . . Suburban schools, schools in wealthy communities, and high-achieving schools are staying with curriculum differentiation,'' Loveless says. ''If tracking is bad policy, society's elites are irrationally reserving it for their own children.''

Oakes' argument, Loveless notes, rested on the assumption that tracking had its origins ''in racism and the protection of class privilege,'' and promised that ending it would reduce the gaps in achievement between white and minority students, and between poor children and children from affluent families.

That's not what happened. The gaps had been shrinking, but the improvement ended approximately the same time as states like California jumped on the detracking bandwagon. The connection between the two is too tenuous -- and the research too inconclusive -- to blame detracking for the changes, but at least it seems clear that there is no credit for it to claim, either.

Loveless reminds readers that tracking doesn't mean what it used to. Children aren't assigned to a single track where they stay for their whole time in school.

From his own research, Loveless predicts that schools in poorer communities are more likely to detrack than school in wealthier communities; the idea of eliminating remedial classes, by whatever name, is evidently more appealing than trying to eliminate honors classes, which brings out parents in angry droves. Schools smaller than about 200 eighth-grade students are very much less likely than larger schools to track, because there aren't enough students in any one subject to make ability grouping feasible.

Loveless correctly describes the debate over tracking as ''shrill,'' but his calm and enlightening book is anything but.

(627 words)