Reply to How to choose an elementary school. By "tracking" or intangibles?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP here.  Thanks for all the thoughts.  I am still as torn as ever, but I appreciate the experiences and opinions to think about.

One PP said that she would lean one way based on the tracking issue but consider other things about the schools highly (location, services, etc.).

Do those who have posted about tracking/not tracking feel strongly that this is a critical factor, or are there other factors as strong?  These two school districts are right next to each other -- one was actually created as overflow when the community serving the first grew, so difference in commute to work is only about 10-15 minutes.

Thanks again![/quote]

Based only on my experiences, I would pick the differentiating school: I went to an K-8 ES that tracked, and I don't like tracking. It was very bad for kids who were good at one subject but weaker in another -- they usually ended up in the bottom track for everything. For kids who were outliers at the top, there was no advancement as we were lumped in with "the top half" of the grade, which left a wide gap within the class. But because they tracked, and we were in the top class, our parents had no argument that we weren't being challenged, even though the class was paced to the lower end of the top track. The best we got was one day per week GT pull outs unrelated to core subject matter. This was most telling in math, when Algebra I was taught to the top track, but at the pace of the slowest students, such that everyone had to repeat Algebra I in high school because the class as a whole didnt' make it all the way through the book. It the end, I did very well in life, but ES could have been more FWIW. That was a long time ago, so maybe tracking is different now, but I doubt it.

Contrast with my DCs, who are in a school that differentiates within the grade and has teachers who are very well trained and supported in differentiation (meaning specialists come in to work with groups too, etc.). I see in these classes groupings that make sense based on actual abilities in the subject matter and even within subsets of a subject matter.  For example, in reading, if 5 students need to work on skills for comprehension, they are in a unit group learning comprehension strategies together even though their reading levels are different - they each use texts at the appropriate level for the child and work together on the comprehension strategy. In the next time block, they regroup to examine advanced texts with a different group of students reading at their same Lexile level. I was skeptical of this at first, but then really amazed at how well it seemed to work. The flexibility of instruction seemed to mirrors the reality of how students learn. For my DCs, even though they are advanced, they remain a part of the class as a whole, and are still pushed to advance at their own pace within the range of their own abilities. They also receive support for areas where they need it, without the risk of being dropped a level in all subjects (this would have been a problem for one DC and would have happened at my ES). I really wish my ES had been this good. To be sure, differentiation requires teachers who can handle this and support from reading and math specialists; plus excellent classroom management skills because this model requires lots of independent and small group work. In reality, for a whole lot of kids, either model will work. It seems to me, (not an expert opinion), that differentiation is best for kids who are very advanced, 2E, or who have split abilities. A social difference I've noticed too is that tracking creates a 'class' culture - are you in the high group or the low group. Differentiation is a different atmosphere. Kids still know who is smart and who is struggling, to be sure; but they get that abilities are nuanced. Some kids are good at everything; some are good at math, but work hard at writing; some kids struggle with reading, but are science geeks. But they are all one class, and for some subjects they are all learning the same thing at the same time, and there is no difference between them. This will change in MS, but I think it is healthy for ES.[/quote]

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