Reply to Public education: competing interests, philosophical divide

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]In some ways, yes, they are at odds.  It is pretty difficult to run a classroom and teach kids who vary widely in their academics. Differentiating by +/- one year in grade level is possible, but not much more than that (absent a much larger teaching staff than what is economically feasible for a public school system). I don't believe that it is feasible to teach a class of 7th graders from all SES levels when some are reading at the 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th grade levels and others are reading at the 3rd grade level.[/quote]

I'm a seventh grade public school teacher and I concur. I know that tracking has been unfairly used to create racially segregated learning settings and deny minority and low-income white children a more rigorous academic experience. However, the problem wasn't tracking. The damage done was in the aim and methods of tracking. In my first decade of teaching, I had separate honors and on-level classes. Generally, students learned the same topics, but methods and the type of assessments differed. There were always a couple misplaced students in my 5-6 classes, but we could accommodate them through differentiating. After four years of teaching mixed ability classes, I can attest that no one is benefitting. There's a wide variation in abilities even without taking special needs into consideration. I prepare at least four levels of readings and still there are one or two students who are not being appropriately challenged or supported. Meanwhile, increasingly parents are pushing for either harder or easier work based almost exclusively on what their child's BFF has. So, even differentiating becomes fraught with problems.[/quote]

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