Reply to s/o Tracking

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Let me add that differentiation within a classroom is a skill that teachers should possess.  How to to reach each and every student? The better the ability of a teacher to differentiate, the better each student will progress.

But expecting a teacher to differentiate across an extremely wide range of skill and ability and exposure and rate of learning and special needs and language difficulties is madness.  Substituting differentiation for flexible and well managed ability grouping is like expecting your family car to fly you to Paris.  It's a fantasy fueled by some political agenda.

Traditional tracking did damage. It was harmful unfair and implemented poorly.  But scrapping it entirely and expecting differentiation to replace it will do just as much damage by paralyzing teachers and forcing them to involuntarily ignore the outliers in that wide variation.  Unless someone is inventing a super robotic perfect teacher machine, professional development can only help so much with this.

There are happy mediums here that support teachers and allow kids at all levels to move forward.  Anybody have some examples of something that falls between traditional rigid tracking and forcing a teacher to miraculously teach to everyones individual need at the same time?

[/quote]

Completely agree. When I was in junior high more than a couple of decades ago, I was bussed to a school in another neighborhood where the socio-economics were very different than the elementary I went to. The first year we were tracked into 3 different ability levels. The result of which was most of the poor kids in the lowest tier and the more well off kids in the advanced track. This definitely had draw backs where it felt like 3 different schools and caused a lot of friction between the kids in the lower and higher tracks (that already had socio-economic and race frictions). So my second year they changed to the differentiated model where they had a mix of all 3 tracks in one classroom. ANd man, was that a nightmare. The teacher had to basically teach 3 classes in the time allotted for one. The lower track students felt even more stupid as they had to literally sit behind someone who was receiving a more advanced lesson than them. The advanced students were relentlessly made fun of for actually doing homework or wanting to succeed. And generally no one group of kids was getting the education they deserved and needed while the teacher was left feeling wiped out. This method only lasted one year. (And I unfortunately did not get an education my entire 8th grade year which haunted me and my classmates through high school).  I don't think there is any one perfect solution but I would not sent my child to a school with a differentiation model vs. a tracking model- regardless of where they fell. Tracking has its cons and drawbacks, but seems to be the approach given any alternatives. [/quote]

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