Is It the Road to Ruin or the Fast Track to Success? : Education: Vista High School considers whether to cut back on the practice of grouping students according to skill level.

Teachers at Vista High School could face a fundamental change when the school board meets tonight to consider curtailing the practice of grouping students of similar skill levels into separate classes, commonly known as tracking.

On one hand, longtime teacher Jim Jordan says the change would force him and his colleagues to teach at one ability level or another.

“You are then forced to either teach to the top end of the class, they do well and the other end of the class fails, or you teach to the lower end and let the top guys take care of themselves,” Jordan said. “In any case, you’re doing a disservice to somebody.”

On the other hand, proponents of the change question the philosophy of tracking, saying it denies large number of students--especially minorities--access to the best curriculum and a chance for education beyond high school.

“What the research shows is that higher track kids, when they’re moved into mixed groups, do as well as they’ve always done, and the lower track kids do much better,” said Bruce Harter, principal at Vista High.

The Vista Unified School District will decide the issue tonight when it takes up a school development plan for Vista High that would reduce the number of tracks there from four to three.

Vista High now has an honors track, a college preparatory track (called A), a less rigorous track for students not going to college (B) and a remedial track (C). The proposal would collapse tracks A and B in the 10th grade to form one college-prep track. The results would be evaluated at the end of the first year, and could lead to reduced tracking in the 11th and 12th grades.

Students could choose which track they go into, and could switch tracks at any time in their high school careers.

But some teachers place little value on the research cited by Harter, preferring to rely on their experience, which they say shows obstacles to teaching a class of students with mixed ability levels.

“You are looking at students coming to the ninth grade who have never passed an English class, and all of a sudden they’re going to have to deal with a more rigorous curriculum?” said Jordan, a 16-year veteran of English teaching at Vista High, who supports the current system.

But Don Phillips, associate superintendent of the Vista district, said, “We assume that until (these students) have any of those kind of fundamental skills, there’s no way they can do some of these higher-order kinds of activities, which really sets an academic tone that doesn’t challenge or stimulate or involve the students.

“What happens in the honors-level programs and college prep is that we ask the kids to think, discuss and apply their knowledge. Oftentimes in the B and C tracks, you don’t have that kind of creative activity, we tend to be more rote with more mechanical kinds of activities, things that are deadly boring.”

Phillips hopes that, by combining the A and B tracks and raising the expectations of the people now in the B track, the students will rise to those expectations.

“The reality is that we’re not preparing kids very well in the B and C tracks and the expectations aren’t high enough,” Phillips said. “We’re saying that high school diplomas should mean that kids can perform at a reasonable level.

“If they can’t write well, if they don’t have proficiency in reading, if they don’t have proficiency in mathematics and higher-level thinking skills, they’re not going to be competent in the work force, they’re going to have difficulty changing jobs, and we’re not doing them any favors.”

But some teachers are not convinced. They argue that simply putting a college prep label on a student does not make him or her college-bound.

“I don’t think you’re doing any better service to the minority students by putting them in a class that carries a label of college prep when in fact it’s not,” Jordan said. “I think we’d be lying to them.”

Complicating the issue at Vista High is the increasing ethnic minority enrollment, now at 35% and climbing. With the minorities come lower levels of English proficiency, one of the main indicators of which track a student would follow.

Marv Abrams, chairman of the social sciences department at Vista High, said 78% of the school’s Latino population is in the lower two tracks, and only 1% is in the honors track. Meanwhile, about 40% of all students are enrolled in the A track and 40% in the B track, with the remaining 20% equally divided among the honors track and the remedial C track.

“What we’re trying to do is increase the number of minority students who are both in our college prep program and in our honors program,” Phillips said. “I think it’s very hard to pinpoint who is going to be academically successful, and who is not.”

Most agree that the skewed numbers of Latinos going into the B track, a non-college prep curriculum, is the result not just of a lack of language skills but also a lack of understanding of the school system by students and their parents, who decide which track the child will enter.

Supporters of the current system believe better administration is the answer.

“The criticism that is often given of tracking is that students are not properly placed, that they tend to be stereotyped,” said Keith Grauman, an honors teacher at Vista. “I think we all need to cooperatively share ownership for that as a problem, but it is not an irresolvable problem that then demands the restructuring and altering of a program that otherwise may be very functional and very effective.”

Grauman said counselors, teachers and administrators must share the burden of making students and parents aware of the options available and recognizing when a student is ready to be moved to a higher track.

But some educators do not accept tracking’s basic tenet that some students are more skilled than others and can be put on a spectrum of skill levels.

“There are perhaps different learning styles,” Abrams said. “But I don’t think we can say that students are brighter than others because they can learn one way and not another way.”

“Good teachers will always get good work out of their students,” Abrams said. “The whole key to this thing is classroom leadership. (The) A tracks have got them with the kids--the students are the leaders. And, if you take all the leaders and put them in the same room, you’re going to have a great time. But, if you have no leadership, and that’s what happens in the B tracks, no one learns.”

The high school’s Parents Teachers and Students Assn. has not taken a position on the issue, according to Linda Maguire, the organization’s president-elect, and does not intend to unless the issue is left unresolved at tonight’s school board meeting.