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[quote=Anonymous] Here is my experience with tracked schooling:

I attended an advanced English instruction school, meaning three hours of English language daily starting at age 8.  Standard curriculum at that time was one hour a week starting at age 10 (that was back home in Russia in early seventies).  The school was technically a neighborhood school in that if you lived in the catchment area, you were enrolled automatically.  However, it was also open to kids from all over the city whose parents cared enough and wanted their kids to speak English fluently, and didn’t mind a long commute (made 100% on public transit). For those kids, there was an informal interview and you were in or out based on how you came across (age 7).  This is how I got in. I lived a 20-minute bus ride away. My cousin, who also got in, lived a 1 ½ tram ride away.  There were similar schools in the city that offered advanced math, advanced P.E. or advanced physics.  You could technically enroll during any grade, but your English speaking ability had to meet the school’s standard for that grade.

Now throughout the school years (we stayed in the same school age 7 through 17 till graduation), it was obvious that some kids struggled and some took to foreign language naturally.  In a free-schooling, socialist country, they couldn’t really kick anyone out, but when it was obvious that a kid was struggling, his or her parents were told clearly that this school was not the best option for their child, and they should look into alternatives. Most kids who struggled ended up moving to other schools because they could only take being miserable for three hours a day for so long.

There was no remedial instruction of any kind, as the entire school was considered advanced track.  The thinking was that “you don’t have to be here, because you can go to any other school, so if you want to stay, you must pull yourself up”. Most of us graduated at age 17 speaking English more or less fluently, meaning enough to succeed in an English-speaking country.  By 11th grade, there were basically very few low performers left in our grade – simply weeded out. I would say we had a culture of achievement in the English language studies that said, you must perform on a high level, or you do not belong here.

Did that make snobs out of us? Maybe a little bit.  But not a lot, because there was still a wide variety of high and low performers in all other subjects.  Just because you were stellar in English didn’t mean you succeeded in all other subjects.  I would say, though, that for most of us, it was presupposed that we were intelligent enough to learn a foreign language fluently, and had parents who cared enough to place us there and support us throughout.

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