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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]16:49 - curious to hear what about tracking does not work? And why tracking can't also be differentiation?  This is not a challenge but geniune curiosity.  (perhaps this should be a new thread but maybe keeping it here will keep it from getting out of hand?). BTW, I ask this keeping Norwood out of it.[/quote]

Sometimes in education we see practices that seem very logical, like common sense, but when we look at the data we realize that they don't get the results that we'd predict.  Medicine is the same way.  Someone comes up with an idea that makes perfect sense "Don't feed your toddler peanuts, instead let their systems mature, and they won't get peanut allergies", made sense, but the data tells us it doesn't actually work that way.

Tracking makes sense.  It's easy to see why people think it should work.  But the reality is that when they've done longitudinal studies on kids who in programs that track vs. programs that don't, they see that the in tracking programs the kids in the bottom group make far less progress than their peers in heterogenous classes, the kids in the middle group make a little less progress than their peers in heterogenous classes, and the kids at the top make a very small bit more progress than their peers in heterogenous classes.  Overall, if you average them all together, the average child in a tracked program does significantly worse than the average child in a non-tracked program.

As to why?  I've heard lots of theories.  Here are a few.  Note, these are all theory, and may apply more or less to individual schools.  Or they could all be wrong, and there could be some mechanism we don't understand at play.

1) Kids live up or down to our expectations.  When we put a kid in the "low" group or the "middle" group, we're essentially saying we don't think very much of them.  Kids absorb this message and are a little less likely to be tenacious about pursuing knowledge or understanding.

2) Kids on the bottom benefit from the exposure to advanced or sophisticated content, even if they can't master it or use it as well as their higher performing peers.

3) Academic growth, especially in the early years, is uneven.  It's notorious for it's stop, start, fast, slow, nature.  Programs that track are making assumptions about kids' long term potential based on a single snapshot in time.  They don't move children quickly enough to respond to the ways that they grow, so kids are still likely to have time periods where things are over their heads, or times when they aren't being challenged.

4) Tracked programs discourage differentiation, because they promote the idea that the students in a group are the same. Teachers whose kids are tracked and who expect their kids to be on a single level, may be less likely to assess frequently, and make data based course adjustments, or changes in programming for individual kids.  They're less likely to use strategies such as exit tickets, or strategy groups, or open ended assignments to accomodate a wide range of learners, and so kids may not receive teaching that is as responsive.

5) Because kids' skills are distributed on a bell curve, clustered about the center, tracking doesn't actually create heterogenous groupings.  Imagine a grade of 45 second graders, where the average child reads on a level 20 (I'm using DRA scores here because that's what I'm most familiar with).  In many schools, you'll have probably 20 kids on a 20, another 5 on a 18 and 5 on a 22, with the others spread out between 1 (not really reading at all) and 80 (ready for high school).  Now, let's say you decide to divide that grade into 3 groups of 15.  One group will range from non reading, to average.  One group will be all average kids.  And one group will range from average to high school.  Only one group is actually at all homogenous.  In addition, you will have students who are very close in skill level receiving 3 very different experiences.

6) Students in the lowest groups may have a disproportionate number of students who are particularly needy.  In a heterogenous group of 15, a teacher might have 2 or 3 kids below grade level, and may be able to differentiate for those kids in part by providing them with extra attention.  In a group of 15 where all 15 are struggling readers, those kids will get far less attention.[/quote]

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