Reply to Jay Matthews: VMPI Probably Will Keep Tracking Just Because of Parent Pressure

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[quote=Anonymous]Matthews does a much better job than Natason in reporting on this one:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/fairfax-county-schools-math-classes-tracking/2021/04/29/197aa29c-a7a2-11eb-8d25-7b30e74923ea_story.html

[quote]Lane, the Virginia state superintendent, is an experienced administrator, having led three school districts. He seems to understand how politically poisonous it would be to tell parents that every child is going to be on the same math track through 10th grade.

But instead of denouncing the idea in our conversation, he said assumptions about what exact changes would be made were premature. “It is just a thought process right now,” he said. “We are going into the community. We are talking about the standards. Nothing is even in draft form or is going to the board. We are just going out and getting feedback on what people think about some of these ideas.

Lane’s spokesman later told me “he does unequivocally denounce the idea that every student should be forced to take the exact same math courses at the same time without options for acceleration.””[/quote]

[quote]Fox, watching the growing debate, said she is not convinced by Lane and Bolling’s insistence that no decisions have been made. “Any experienced teacher knows that without tracking, teachers will be forced to teach to the lowest common denominator and the brightest students will languish, or teachers will teach to the middle and struggling students will fall behind,” she said.

I think the growing publicity will doom most of this reform effort. School board members, both state and local, tend to back off from anything that draws angry parents to their meetings. In my experience, the best and most resilient educational changes start in classrooms and stay there. That may be one reason that they survive.[/quote][/quote]

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