For this weeks Passion blog I wanted to focus specifically on how schools in America are structured. More specifically how they are broken up into two distinct categories. Schools that are separated by their different tracks and schools that are separated by ability grouping. A lot of people think that these two concepts are the same thing, but in reality they are constructed quite differently and yield different results.
Ability grouping is splitting kids up into different groups in the same classroom based on their individual skills in a certain subject area. For example, this could be having three different reading groups for a class (beginner, regular, and advanced). This technique is used primarily when children are much younger and is very adaptable. Most children are in one group for reading but fall into another group for their math skills and in an other group for their history skills and so on and so forth.
Tracking is placing students on separate tracks to complete their schooling and is most often used in older students especially in high school. For example, there might be a regular track, honors, AP, and college level tracks. The difference between this type of education and ability grouping is that most kids stay in one level for all of their classes. This means that there is little to no mobility between the levels and it is extremely hard to move upward. In fact, the younger kids are when they are placed in a track, the harder it will be for them to get out of it. Another thing that comes into play is that the instructors for the smartest kids in the best tracks are normally the smartest teachers. This may seem logical at first but in fact it just puts the kids in the lower levels at even more of a disadvantage since they are being taught the least challenging and engaging material from the worst teachers in the school. In fact, there is a lot of research that suggests the way to combat this issue is to instead give the lowest tracks the best teachers in order to balance out the scores of the students.
One of the most interesting things to look at when comparing these two different styles of schooling is the results that they yield. For instance, both of these two types of schooling in America yield practically the same average and median. However, the one major difference is between the highest and lowest performers. Schools that have ability grouping have a much smaller variance with their being not as many outliers since they were all taught in the same classroom by the same teachers. On the other hand, you have tracking classrooms which have students who score much higher and much lower making the variance between the two groups very large. This is because they weren’t taught in the same classroom, but instead the smartest kids were taught by the smartest teachers and the dumbest kids were taught by the worst teachers.
This begs the question of which one of these two different systems is better and honestly it is hard to make an accurate judgement. On one hand, ability grouping may better as a whole since it brings up the lowest scores making most of the kids finish in the middle of the pack. However, tracking also has the highest scores since ability grouping may limit the potential of the smartest students by holding them back. There needs to be a way in which we can bring up the lowest scores of all of the kids without hurting the scores of the highest achieving kids. I just don’t know how that will work.