Student Ability Tracking and Educational Policy

Where I teach, at an independent school,students must pass through a relatively rigorous filter before attending. Our admission office considers standardized tests, essays and interviews, and accepts those it figures are best suited for the school. In other words, the whole school is "tracked." Only people who have chosen to undergo the process and then have met certain standards ever enroll.

Even so, teachers will sometimes remark on how difficult it is to teach classes in which the range of students' ability is too wide. These complaints bug me in part because of their factual context, but also because I think they represent a kind of professional laziness.

In its latest report on educational policies and trends, the Brookings Institute includes similar comments from a survey of public school teachers:

A substantial number of teachers believe that heterogeneous classes are difficult to teach. The 2008 MetLife Survey of the American Teacher asked teachers to react to the following statement: “My class/classes in my school have become so mixed in terms of students’ learning ability that I/teachers can’t teach them.” Responses were: 14% “agree strongly,” 29% “agree somewhat,” 28% “disagree somewhat,” and 27% “disagree strongly.”³¹ The percentages are surprising given the questionnaire’s blunt assertion that heterogeneous classes are impossible to teach. Moreover, the 43 percent of respondents that either agree strongly or somewhat agree with the prompt is up from 39 percent on the same survey item in 1988. Teachers’ beliefs about the impact of achievement heterogeneity on instruction undergird the use of ability grouping and tracking.

Now, public school teachers have problems that I don't. They don't have an admission office, and they don't always have the support of the parents. But this extreme hand-wringing is embarrassing. It's our job to teach kids where they are, not where we wish they were. Just get on it.

Tracking in certain subjects -- math, foreign language -- may facilitate certain kinds of learning and may even be necessary. But I'm not positive that's true all the time, and I think it's time for teachers to think carefully about what they are doing and why. I do not think it's right for teachers to call on administrators to filter student differences just to make the teachers' job easier