My first memories of tracking come from first and second grade. My first grade education was very much a product of the times—1975. Ridge Hill School in Hamden had six classrooms that opened onto a common amphitheater-like pit. All students in the first, second, and third grades were together, as in a Montessori school. And we were placed in groups according to our abilities. I was in Mrs. Davis’ homeroom with all first graders, in Mrs. Plummer’s Language Arts class with a mix of first and second graders, and in Mrs. Oates’ Math class with all third graders. I was very intimidated in that class, and my mother had me moved to Miss Rochford’s Math class, where I was one of three first graders with mostly second graders. Other than my brief time with Mrs. Oates, I thrived in that environment.
At the end of first grade my family moved to Madison, where students were grouped more traditionally, and to my mother’s great surprise I was placed in a special education class for students with severe learning disabilities. When she demanded to know why I was placed in this class, the administrators told her that the placement was based on my score on a standardized assessment I had taken in the spring of the previous year. When my mother demanded to see the exam, she noticed immediately that I had completed the bubble sheet by making geometric patterns. Turns out that the teachers in my previous school had made me take the exam with the older students while most of the other first graders were brought outside to play. The teachers must have told me I could join the other first graders when I completed the exam, and so I just made squares and rectangles and trapezoids and the like on the answer sheet. I would remember this experience years later when I first read Mike Rose’s Lives On the Boundary, in which he recounts a year spent misplaced in a low level track.
So I feel as though even these earliest of personal experiences demonstrated for me the benefits and the potential atrocities implicit in any system that sorts or tracks by ability. And I see this now with my own children, who are three and six. My daughter now and my son before her have thrived in a multi-age Montessori preschool, but my son is struggling mightily in a traditional first grade classroom in a so-called failing school where the focus is on basic reading and math skills, where ELL and ESL students outnumber native English speakers, and where science and social studies have been eliminated from the curriculum and specials like music and art have been reduced to being offered at best once a week and sometimes only a couple of times a month. He is bored and unchallenged most of the time, and occasionally gets bad reports for task refusal. When we ask him what happened he simply says that he hates doing all the baby work.
There is no gifted and talented or enrichment jadwal at his school, though there are various remediation programs funded by state and federal grants, but I agitated enough to get him thirty minutes of enrichment every afternoon with one of two graduate interns from Eastern Connecticut State University. To get this I had to make a Faustian bargain, basically that the enrichment would only come at the end of the day if my son had complied with all tasks during the morning and early afternoon. If he refuses to do what he calls baby work, he loses his enrichment time. I feel like Atticus Finch when he tells Scout that if she agrees to put up with the teacher’s demands he will continue to do real reading with her in the evenings when he gets home from work.
And I think of course about my years teaching high school. I taught many senior electives that were open to students from all tracks, and there was something wonderful about that. In fact, I distinctly recall one girl remarking that she had not sat in a class with some of those students since before middle school. On the other hand, I also taught sections of American Literature at all levels—Advanced Placement, Level 1 (college prep), and Level 2 (basic). And while I was teaching works like The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, Huck Finn, and As I Lay Dying in the AP class, and moving onto a new text every two to three weeks, in the Level 2 classes I had students who simply could not read those books. I would assign short stories by Hawthorne, Melville, and Faulkner, and maybe take four weeks to methodically make our way through Huck Finn. I really don’t know what I would have done had all those students been mixed together in one class. My wife teaches Spanish and Italian, including UConn Spanish, and she has similar concerns. At one professional development workshop at her school, she asked the presenter for suggestions for differentiating a Spanish class in which she might want to teach Don Quijote but would have students who clearly could not read the book, and the suggestion was to put the students into ability level groups within the class. This, of course, is tracking, just done within the four walls of a classroom and hidden behind the façade of a homogenous class.
Anyway, those are my myriad concerns, and I welcome any insight others could give on the subject. I remain profoundly ambivalent.
Comments
Post a Comment