THE NATION : EDUCATION : A System That Advocates Equality Everywhere but in the Classroom

Most parents and educators are aware of the resilience of tracking, or ability-grouping, within a classroom into blue birds, red birds and such. Recent events remind us that innovations like honors courses and class ranking extend this controversial practice to the school population at large.

My high school had three tracks of everything. English, math, history and science classes were all carved into groups with designations like “honors,” “college prep,” and “remedial.” Who ended up where was the great education lottery that decided futures.

Lately, groups of frightened parents, anxious to ensure that their children’s lottery numbers come up a winner, are scurrying to preserve education practices, some of them possibly illegal, that distinguish one student from another. Tracking, ability-grouping, honors courses, GATE programs, advance-placement courses and class ranking have always served three purposes: the school mechanism grinds along smoothly as students of presumably different abilities are taught at different levels; well-tracked students are made to feel special by fawning teachers, and those students’ parents are allowed to trust in the idea that their children, by being set aside, will not fall through the cracks in a system they find unchallenging.

Now, that trust is being shaken as various forms of honors tracking come under fire--and parents have aggressively rallied to their defense. Earlier this fall in Plainsboro, N.J., when the school board decided to abolish class rankings, a local furor erupted. Angry parents of high-ranking students at Windsor-Plainsboro High School charged that the board had made a terrible mistake, defended the value of competition and demanded reconsideration. One mother of a student in the academic top 10 sarcastically told a reporter: “We have to get rid of class rank because we live in a touchy-feely society and everyone is supposed to feel good.”

“60 Minutes” recently uncovered tracking, of the worst sort, in Georgia high schools. The story is familiar: The honors classes are all white, the remedial ones all black. Presented with what seems to be an illegal instance of schools tracking students along racial lines, a group of white Georgia parents turned on the news crew, defended their system as proper and effective and blamed outsiders for unfairly casting it in a negative light. Similar passions surfaced, years ago, in a South Carolina school district. When an incoming African American superintendent tried to get rid of a similar sort of tracking, the mostly white school board voted to get rid of him.

More recently, the author of a new book on the failures of U.S. education decried what he perceived to be the reform movement’s “attack on excellence.” Complaining that bright kids are being “dumbed down” to ensure that all students learn at the same pace, the author not only defended honors tracking, he called for more of it.

As the battle over school choice flares up again in the coming years, as admission into elite universities becomes even more difficult, as the education system is perceived to be continually deteriorating, these ideas, once considered elitist, will grow increasingly popular. Already, public support for honors tracking cuts across political, education and class lines.

Never mind that the vast majority of students, some of them having been adversely affected by tracking, do not fall into the top 1%, 5%, or 10%. Never mind that their children have, in truth, benefited not only from their own hard work, sacrifice and discipline but also from an academic lottery of fortune over which they had little or no control. And never mind that, in too many cases, those with the worst lottery numbers are Latino or African American. White liberals who, 30 years ago, may have marched against school segregation in the South have backed off the goal of real integration in education. Now, as middle-class parents concerned that their own children receive a quality education, even if that may mean doing so within a honors-course cocoon, they tolerate a new form of segregation.

Parents who campaign to preserve honors courses and class rank must, at least, sense that something is wrong with public education. The faith of parents in the quality of their children’s schools is an intangible gut feeling, to be sure, as difficult to measure as a citizen’s fear of crime or a consumer’s confidence in a healthy economy. A director of the College Board likens it to how the electorate feels about congressmen: We like our own, but we are sure that Congress, as an institution, is flawed. While many parents have faith in their own children’s school, there are signs that parental faith in public schools, in general, continues to erode, despite the fact that students’ SAT scores bounced back a bit this year after a 10-year decline. Meanwhile, according to the Home-Schooling Legal Defense Fund, the parents of nearly 1 million children in the United States have fled public schools altogether and resorted to teaching their own children, in all subjects, from kindergarten to high school. Home-schooling, in some cases, continues year-round and has recently spread to all 50 states.

Public schools work for some students and still turn out individual success stories. An administrator at my old high school freely admits that the current system works quite well for the top-ranked 10% of students. Moreover, those who succeed academically do so not only because of honors tracking, but also because of positive parental involvement, constructive peer pressure, teacher encouragement, proper counseling, as well as their own will, vision and hard work. Hitting academic home-runs is still up to individual students, but being in the right class puts them in the major leagues.

Tracking, honors courses and class ranking offer little more than a life raft from the sinking ship of U.S. education, and all some parents want is to keep their rafts afloat. A better solution would be to halt the panicked escape of the chosen few by keeping the ship from sinking. Raising standards for teachers and students across the board, increasing discipline, improving courses, and most of all, teaching students not to run away from--but to help--one another, all would contribute.

Consider the alternative: Concerned parents ready to go to war, or at least to court, to preserve their child’s sequestration from classmates or a class ranking of No. 2 instead of No. 3, while the vast majority of other people’s children are left behind to perish. And, in time, our country’s future with them.