Tracking Students Fails to Produce Right Results : Those put in remedial classes almost never escape. They would do better with brighter classmates around them, and those more accomplished would not suffer.

Around the turn of the century it was believed that a person’s level of intelligence remained static for life.

A theory of fixed intelligence helped satisfy the demands of the workplace and public education. Schools knew, early on, who would be going into factory jobs and who into the professions. Ability-level grouping was efficient, allowing teachers to work with large groups of same-level students at one time. Tracking, as it is known, seemed eminently logical and remained unchallenged for decades.

An entire educational culture grew around tracking. In my grade school, classes were referred to by number. “Six-one” had the smartest sixth-graders, and the wonderful Mrs. Mecklenburg, and “six-four” the dumbest. Since then we’ve become a bit more subtle. We switched to yellow, red and green” or robin, sparrow and blue jay. No matter what the name, kids, teachers and parents always know who the “dumb” kids are and who are the “bright” ones.

At the lowest end, remedial classes are supposed to prepare students to enter regular grade-level programs. However, with few exceptions, students, once on, never leave the remedial track. And tracking begins as early as second grade.

My first experience with a remedial class came two years ago when my teaching schedule included remedial eighth-grade English.

“But,” I told the principal, “the state education code says there are to be no tracked classes, other than honors.”

“No problem,” she said, and with a few strokes of her eraser removed the “R” designation.

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That eighth-grade non-remedial class was the class from hell. I spent more time on discipline than on teaching. Whether disruptive behavior is a result or cause of low skills is still open for debate. Whatever the reason, a core of my students were on a first-name basis with the school’s deans.

I wasn’t the only teacher to be blessed. The group traveled together from subject to subject. It wasn’t surprising that they accomplished so little. They didn’t know how far behind they were, or how immature and inappropriate their behavior. There was not a successful role model in the bunch.

They did what they did, which wasn’t much, and didn’t expect to get any better. They succeeded only in meeting the school’s, and their own, expectations. Nobody expected them to improve, and nobody was disappointed.

In 1989 the Carnegie Institute’s “Turning Points” reported, at the conclusion of a comprehensive study, that students who had been performing at a low level did much better when working in heterogeneous groups with more accomplished students. As a result of the Carnegie study and others like it, many U.S. school districts have abandoned the remedial designation.

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In Los Angeles, amazingly, there is no districtwide policy. Whether to track is up to individual schools. Some are still tracking, in fact if not in name. Some, like mine, do not track (except for honors classes) and provide an extra hour of language arts instruction for a few of the many students who need the additional help.

There is little argument against the notion that children at the lower end of the scale do better in heterogeneous groups. There continues to be considerable debate, however, about the effect of such grouping on kids at the higher end.

After all, there is a positive value in having an honors label. Parents fight to get their kids into honors programs and to keep them there. Honors classes are prestigious, are often assigned better teachers, take more field trips and are the first to get new textbooks. In short, they have the competitive edge. In fact, teachers are seeing a dumbing-down in honors programs. Too many students are in honors who have neither the motivation nor the performance to justify their presence.

As part of education reform efforts, some school districts have decided that the honors recognition on a pupil’s record should be earned through continued superior performance, not because the student did well on a particular test, on a certain day, some time in the past. In these districts, students are grouped heterogeneously, and all students are given the opportunity to earn “challenge points” by doing extra credit work.

English teachers in the Las Virgenes Unified School District recently tried, unsuccessfully, to eliminate the honors designation and substitute the more-equitable challenge method. Community representatives fought the teachers’ proposal. They “argued that bright students would lose their motivation if they were lumped in with average students,” a news report said. This is an unproved theory.

Expecting students to earn their honors designation and offering the challenge to all students seems like sound educational policy to me. Still, the community representatives vetoed it.

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Traditionally, remedial-type classes have been filled with poor minority students; honors classes, with students from middle to upper socioeconomic groups. Is in-school segregation by ability grouping about intelligence and sound education? Or could it be about race, poverty, and politics?

I was sorry the Las Virgenes teachers backed down. Student tracks are determined early and are relatively fixed, thereby denying equal access to all students. Honors classes are language-rich and stimulating--the way all classes should be. Remedial classes are deadly to teach and a dead end for the students who fill them.