One of the most controversial issues in U.S. education is homogenous grouping - that is, separating youngsters into classes according to how well they achieve -- vs. heterogeneous grouping -- putting children achieving at all levels into the same class. There are people who say that homogenous grouping, or tracking as it is sometimes called, is essential to providing every child with a good education. Others are convinced that tracking labels kids in lower tracks forever and makes them perform worse than they would in mixed classes. They condemn tracking as elitist and discriminatory. Generally, educators who write and speak about tracking denounce it. However, it is widely practiced, so many people must think it is beneficial for children -- or perhaps don't know what else to do.
Instead of joining this argument, we need to realize that both sides are right and both are wrong. The question is not, "Should we track or reject racking entirely?" It is, "How do we organize schools and classrooms, given the fact that kids learn differently and at different rates?"
People who say that heterogeneous grouping doesn't work point to the differences among children. They ask, "If you don't track, how can you keep the curriculum from being watered down? How can you teach an eight-grade class when some of the kids are functioning at a third-grade level and others are at a sixth- or ninth- or eleventh-grade level? How do you maintain high standards without causing youngster who are struggling to give up?
These are real problems given our basic instructional method - whole-class instruction, which means presenting the lesson to the entire class - especially since teachers must cover a lot of ground. If the teacher pitches the lesson to "average" students, the kids who know the material or catch on quickly will get bored and tune out; the ones who are behind and can't follow will do the same. Whatever the teacher does, many students will get little out of the lesson.
But there are alternatives. One is presented by Harold Stevenson and James Stigler in The Learning Gap (New York: Simon & Schuster, Summit Books, 1992). They describe how teachers in Asian elementary schools make effective use of whole-class teaching with mixed classes. Their secret is depth instead of breadth. Math teachers focus on a single problem instead of many different ones. They get each student to explain the way he or she solved the problem and compare it with other students' methods. This allows youngsters to hear the reasoning behind successful and unsuccessful strategies for solving a problem. And it means that virtually anybody understands the solution -- and various ways of getting to it -- well enough to build on it.
A second alternative to tracking is to organize the class like a one-room school or a Boy Scout troop. Instead of listening to the teacher all the time, children work at their level, individually or in small groups, and with the help of the teacher or paraprofessionals or other youngsters.
These ways of organizing a heterogeneous class do not bore some kids and leave others behind. All students are engaged and working hard.
Just as heterogeneous grouping can work if it's done right, so can tracking. In other industrialized countries, where they systematically track all their students -- top, bottom and middle -- do better than ours. A decent system of tracking offers a tough, challenging curriculum in every track. In Germany, where kids start being tracked when they are in fifth grade, all get an education of value. Whether they are in a track that will lead to university, a technical school or an apprenticeship, German students know that the work they do will get them something they want. So they work hard.
In this country, when we track we almost always do it miserably. Poor parents and minorities, especially, perceive the lower tracks as dumping grounds for children, and it's not hard to see why. Kids in these tracks often get little worthwhile work to do; they spend a lot of time filling in the blanks in workbooks or ditto sheets. And because we expect almost nothing of them, they learn very little.
When people argue about homogeneous and heterogeneous grouping, they usually compare a bad example of homogeneous grouping with a good one of heterogeneous grouping-or vice versa. When we compare the best of both, we find that both have strengths. Until one system is shown to be vastly superior to the other, we should not mandate either homogenous or heterogeneous grouping but work to develop effective models of both, talking particular care with tracking systems that they are not used to separate students racially. Then we should give teachers and families a high degree of choice about the system they prefer.