George Vlasits on tracking

The following is reprinted with permission. Links have been added in the first paragraph to reference articles and organizations cited for background. Thank you, Mr. Vlasits for taking the time to put together this thoughtful and thorough overview of your position on this issue. Your time and effort are greatly appreciated.

~~~~~~~

I have been following the numerous postings to both the GTA and Parents Coalition listserves in response to the de Vise article in the Post on Dec. 16th and to the proposed changes to Montgomery County Public School policy coming from the AEI advisory committee. I am concerned that the views and arguments of those of us who oppose GT labeling, and more importantly tracking based on that labeling, have not been clearly represented. I did reply on the Parents Coalition to a few of the postings and have received several thoughtful responses, but felt that it would be better if I tried to lay out a more complete analysis of what I view as the logic of MCEF (and the movement to detrack public schools) and present that to both listserves in the hope of promoting a spirited, but rational dialogue on the issues. I do this in large part because I firmly believe that working through these issues would be a positive step towards engaging MCPS around the issue that concerns all of us, improving the education that the students in our schools receive. I welcome critical comments and will respond, as time allows.

I want to be clear that the ideas I am expressing are mine alone (I am not a spokesperson for MCEF) but I believe they are consistent with the goals of MCEF. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a member of MCEF and have been active in the organization over the past 5 years. I have been a teacher in MCPS for 25 years and am currently Social Studies Resource teacher at Montgomery Blair. I am also active in MCEA, the teacher's union and an elected member of their Council on Teaching and Learning (the MCEA body which supposedly has input into decisions on curriculum and pedagogy in MCPS). I have a son who spent 13 years in MCPS and graduated from Blair in the Communication Arts Program. For the last 12 years I have taught honors and AP classes at Blair, but prior to that I taught all "levels" of classes in MCPS, special education at a center in North Carolina and heterogeneous 11th and 12th grade history classes in a high school in New Jersey.

Furthermore, I have not always been an advocate of detracking, and even since becoming committed to the "cause", have had to deal with the apparent dissonance between my beliefs and what I was doing (teaching high fliers in tracked classes). So, I've had to think, long and hard, about why I support detracking. What follows is an attempt to reproduce that thinking, which has led me to conclude that "tracking" is detrimental to the education of ALL students and that by detracking we can BEGIN to address SOME of the major problems of American education.

MY UNDERSTANDING OF WHAT TRACKING IS

Identifying students as "gifted and talented" based on some measures of academic ability or academic preparedness and placing them in separate groups within a school or school system; providing those groups with educational opportunities which are different than those provided to the group not identified as GT (called "enriched and innovated" or "accelerated" or simply "GT").

WHAT I BELIEVE IS WRONG WITH TRACKING

1. Labeling and tracking are, to a considerable extent, responsible for exacerbating (and, in some ways, even creating) the achievement gap. I know that other factors are important (for example, academic preparedness when entering school and parental support throughout school). Many of these factors are beyond the control of the school system, so the focus needs to be on what the school system can do to overcome these obstacles. Borrowing from the medical profession, I would argue “First, do no harm.”

What happens when you start with a group of young children who come to school with less preparation, segregate them from the students more academically prepared, set a lower level of expectations for them and provide them with materials that are not "enriched and innovative"? They fall further and further behind and get less and less interested in school, so that even if you offer them the opportunity to move onto the GT track when they are "ready", they will never be ready (that is without divine intervention).

2. Tracking lowers expectations for the non-GT students. No amount of wishful thinking can wish this away. It lowers the expectations of teachers, it lowers the expectations of parents, and most importantly, it lowers the expectations of the students themselves. It's the system saying, loud and clear, "You cannot expect to fly" and "You need to be satisfied with learning to crawl." When the system says one group gets "enriched and innovative" instruction, it seems obvious what the other group will get. If they are both going to get "enriched and innovative" instruction, then why are they separated?

Not only are expectations lowered, so is the quality of instruction. I see this at the high school level, and am certain that it is replicated at the elementary and middle school levels. It is obvious that some members of the community believe that schools in MCPS offer little or no consideration of the educational needs of the GT students and that they are ignored and neglected as compared to non GT students. My 25 years as an MCPS teacher and my 13 years as the parent of an MCPS student have led me to conclude that this is for the most part not an accurate assessment and that it is the "non-GT" students whose educational needs have been most frequently and seriously neglected. This is not to say that GT services are evenly accessible across the system or that the quality of GT education is what it should be, but rather to note that, looking at this in terms of comparative neglect, the situation is far worse in the middle and at the bottom the academic ladder than it is at the top.

My point here is NOT to juxtapose the needs of one group of student to those of another. If we want to raise the bar, we can best accomplish this by raising the bar for ALL students. Just imagine if those who have been advocating for GT education AND those who have been working to end tracking AND those who have been fighting for special needs students were working together to fight for the highest quality education for ALL students, what we could accomplish!

3. Separating (segregating) children by "ability" has detrimental effects on those classified as "not GT". It invalidates their experiences and it stigmatizes them. In an earlier posting to the Parents Coalition listserve, I referenced Brown v Board, primarily to draw on the noted justices' conclusion that segregation was inherently unequal. If this is true for racial segregation (and there is a mountain of sociological and psychological evidence to support it) than how can it be any less true for segregation which is justified on the basis of supposed intellectual inequality? All one needs to do to verify this is to talk with students in the non GT or non Honors classes. Negative self image becomes a barrier to learning which is extremely difficult to breach; as the student progresses through the school system, this barrier gets higher and students become more likely to give up (which is most often a source of disruptive behavior in the classroom).

Couple that with the ultimate irony that one of the effects of this form of segregation is to replicate racial segregation (albeit de facto rather than de jure, but segregation nonetheless) struck down by Brown. Were the justices wrong in both their conclusions concerning the effects of segregation or in their belief that equity is a fundamental tenet of a democracy and something that public schools ought to be promoting? I doubt whether anyone reading this thinks the Supreme Court was wrong in Brown. Given that, if what we have done is to revive “separate and unequal” (whether by race or by income or by both), we need to take a long look to determine how to undo this unequal education.

The ultimate effect of tracking based on the labels is de facto segregation in the classroom. If someone is not aware of this, I challenge them to walk into any school in the county which has some diversity in its population and just check out the GT groupings (or honors level classes) and then look at the non-GT groupings. I can walk into any academic classroom at Blair and simply note the percentage of white, Asian, black and Hispanic students and tell you the level of the class. Jonathan Kozol, in his book "The Shame of the Nation", has argued that American schools are more segregated today than at any time since 1968. While this is true when one looks at the number of students attending all minority or all white schools, it is just as true in nominally integrated schools in progressive Montgomery County. Segregation within schools is as insidious as segregation between schools (and in Montgomery County we can see both).

Of course, one might pose the question as to whether breaking the barriers that segregation creates is a legitimate and significant goal of public education. As a US History teacher I know that public education in the US has always had, as one of its major objectives, the preparation of each generation of young people for their role as the future leaders in our society, which goes well beyond the three “Rs”. That there is both a moral and a practical imperative to overcome the limitations of a segregated society seems obvious to me and thus I would argue that segregation in public schools is detrimental to ALL students, as it fails to prepare them for the future in an increasing diverse American society.

4. Finally, I would like to point out that there are major problems with defining and measuring "gifted and talented". The significance of this is that we are taking young children, applying a very imprecise and subjective set of criteria and from that determining the paths (tracks) that their education (and ultimately their lives) will take.

The Marland Report (1972) was the first attempt to develop a systematic definition for "gifted and talented" and is, as far as I know, still the standard. The report defined as "gifted and talented" those capable of high performance, which it stated "...include those with demonstrated achievement and/or potential ability in any of the following areas, singly or in combination:

General intellectual ability,

Specific academic aptitude,

Creative or productive thinking,

Leadership ability,

Visual and performing arts, or

Psychomotor ability."

How do we measure these? How many children may have "potential ability" in one or more of these areas? Five percent? Forty percent? Ninety percent? And how many "diamonds in the rough" will we miss no matter how sophisticated the criteria we develop are? Why should we delineate between these two groups and separate them? What would happen if we recognized that ALL second graders have gifts and talents, which they could use to contribute to their own and each others' development, if placed together in an environment which recognizes and encourages both achievement and diversity?

What makes this worse is how it is implemented. The system develops limited criteria, which mostly measure academic preparedness in certain areas, primarily math and reading. Then we make concessions to the subjective evaluations of teachers and parents and on that basis make a determination of who is (and, by definition, who is not) GT and who is (and is not) recommended for GT instruction. The result is that at some schools, where parents and teachers aggressively support the labeling of children as GT, there are often much higher rates of identification, while at others (generally those whose students come from backgrounds were they get less academic preparation before they enter school and/or where the parents are, for one reason or another, unable to advocate for their children) there are lower rates of identification.

The question I'm left with is why should we label these children "gifted and talented" at all and not simply note their progress in different academic areas? Suzie can add, subtract and multiply two digit numbers in 1st grade. Johnny has a vocabulary of "x" number of words in 1st grade. That information is valuable in determining how to make instruction relevant to the needs of the child and would have no other implication. Services, rather than labels, are, I think, much more important to a child’s development.

If Johnny and Suzie and Adam (whose is "gifted" in the physical manipulation of objects) are in the same class they will learn from each other and all will benefit. Separating students based on "ability" denies all children (those on the GT track and those who are not) the experiences of those who may not be just like them. Children learn from other children. That interaction is an extremely important part of their social and intellectual development. Group them heterogeneously and you broaden their educational experience; group them homogeneously and you narrow it.

THE WRONG (read MCPS) APPROACH TO FIXING THE PROBLEMS

1. Fix the numbers rather than fix the problem. MCPS is obsessed with certain kinds of test data (although they frequently are very shoddy in their actual collection of data.) So obsessed that they have created entire departments in the bureaucracy that do nothing but create and manipulate data. Their goal is to show how well our "World Class" system is doing. The result is that they attack the symptoms rather than the disease. Push more underperforming students into honors and AP classes in high school; changing the math curriculum so more students can complete Algebra I in 7th or 8th grade. Etc., etc.

There are two problems with this: the first is how you measure the various aspects of learning. A criteria that is frequently used is how fast students are moving through the curriculum and how soon they reach a certain benchmark (like passing Algebra 1). This has been the approach to math and the MCPS data shows very significant improvement. The problem is that what students learn (or miss) along the way isn't measured. High school math teachers around the county (and in particular math teachers in the magnet at Blair) have found that many of the students, who have been pushed through this accelerated program, have not mastered basic concepts necessary to move on to higher level courses. Quantifying learning is not simple (I would argue, as a former math teacher, it's probably a lot easier in math than in most other subjects).

But an even bigger problem comes from the fact that people who are doing the data collection are not educators conducting objective research, but bureaucrats, whose goal is to "prove" that what they are doing is working. I'll leave it to your imagination, what happens here.

2. Lower the bar. In general, MCPS has decided that one of the best measures of educational excellence is the percent of students taking honors or AP classes. Once again its data shows great progress; more and more students are taking these classes and the gains have been particularly significant among minorities. There is only one problem; simply pushing students into higher level classes doesn't mean that they are learning more. In fact it usually means that the expectations in those classes are lowered. It's the standard joke among teachers (although it's not funny at all) that honors classes are what we used to call on-level classes, and AP is the "new" honors. MCPS then changes the grading system (so students who don’t even attempt to answer "constructed response" questions still get 50% on Achievement Series tests and exams), makes it very clear that teachers better not "fail" too many students and then turns around and claims that they aren't lowering the bar.

3. Set up a pilot but don't provide the necessary resources and don't make provisions for evaluating it. I give you the "no labels" pilots, Burning Tree and Georgian Forest. Burning Tree teachers did get some significant training in differentiation the first year but then were on their own; Georgian Forest teachers got none. And there were (and are) no provisions for evaluating the results. Outside of anecdotal evidence, we don't know what the effect of these "pilots" has been.

My point here is that what MCPS is doing is NOT detracking at all. It's reacting to the very real criticism that it is failing many of its students (particularly in minority and less affluent areas of the county) by pretending to focus on "raising the bar" and "closing the gap" while manipulating the data to demonstrate how successful it is. This is extremely frustrating to teachers (and many in mid-level administration positions) who are advocating for real change.

MYTHS AND QUESTIONS ABOUT DETRACKING

1. Advocates of detracking are opposed to rigorous educational standards. If that were true, you could count me out! My son received the benefits of innovative and enriched instruction in MCPS (and there definitely were benefits, although I also believe that his education could have been better). What nags me constantly is the question: If that was good for him, why wouldn't it be good for all the students? I know the answer that I will get from many people is that "They aren't prepared (or able) to take advantage of it." OK, but why? And what can we do to prepare them for it? And shouldn't that be what we are doing, preparing them, encouraging them, expecting more of them and giving them a stool so they can reach higher? And which provides the better climate to accomplish that? Segregating out those who are prepared to perform at a higher level? Both logic and experience seem to argue against that.

2. Advocates of detracking believe that "one size fits all". Not true. The key to genuinely detracked education is differentiation. Students learn in different ways and at different paces, but they can all learn. "Effective differentiation requires the use of flexible grouping patterns so that students consistently work in a variety of groups based on readiness, interest, learning preference, random assignment, teacher choice and student choice". (Tomlinson, The Differentiated School) This is the antithesis of "one size fits all".

3. Advocates of detracking believe that all students can achieve at the same level. No, they can't, but if we set limits (and that's what tracking does for the non GT students) we will never know just what they can achieve. If we say that the goal for every student is that he or she should complete at least a year of calculus before graduating high school, does that mean every student will? No. Will some students exceed that goal? Yes, but not at the expense of other students' lowered expectations. (Note: It is my experience, both as a parent and as an educator, that setting higher goals for high achieving students is not necessary – they set the higher goals for themselves). And along the way, maybe the students will all have learned an important lesson - that education doesn't have to be a zero sum game, but rather that they can all win.

4. Detracking means teaching to the middle, lowering the bar, dumbing down the curriculum. Once more, you could count me out if this were true. What detracked education looks like is taking the best that we have to offer and offering it to everyone. It means that we need to provide support for those who need it (this can take many different forms), but it does not mean we have to hold back those who are ready to fly.

5. Detracking would eliminate all homogeneous grouping. No. There are certainly situations when homogeneous grouping is appropriate. Differentiation can take many forms and limited, flexible homogeneous grouping is definitely one of them.

OBJECTIONS TO DETRACKING

I imagine in the next couple of weeks, I'll become much more familiar with the objections, but I wanted to address a couple that I am already familiar with.

1. Teachers don't have the resources to deal with students at all different levels at the same time. As a teacher, I can assure you that this is a logical and reasonable objection, but not an insurmountable one. First, there are resources that are indispensable to success - among them are initial and on-going training in differentiation; a developed and flexible "GT" curriculum; supports for students who may need extra help in attaining a particular objective (longer school day, longer school year, lunch time programs, etc.); more planning and collaboration time for teachers; etc. To implement quality detracked education will require the commitment of resources, but so does the implementation of quality tracked education.

I would argue that there is one resource that detracked education creates on its own. The vast majority of teachers go into teaching because they want students to succeed; genuine differentiated instruction, I believe, will create that very important resource by itself - teacher enthusiasm! If there is any doubt about that, check with the staffs at the “no labels pilots” (Burning Tree and Georgian Forest), where very minor efforts at detracking seem to have produced that effect.

2. Research shows that, for students identified as GT, tracking results in higher levels of academic attainment and therefore detracking will "hold back" gifted students (and deprive society of their gifts). Actually, research shows conflicting results of tracking on those identified as GT. And most of the research on tracking is limited in what it measures and in its criteria for "success." Admittedly, there is not enough research into the effects of detracking, but, what there is, seems to support the position that with detracking, those who would have previously been identified for GT programs do as well, or better, than they would have in homogeneous settings. For those interested, there is a school system in Rockville Center, NY that has been detracking throughout the system (starting in the elementary grades) for the past 15 years. Information on the results is available in a recently published book, Detracking for Excellence and Equity, by Burris and Garrity. (An excellent resource for more information is on the web is Education Resources Information Center, http://eric.ed.gov/, search "detracking").

3. Equity in education (or "radical egalitarianism") should not be a goal of public education. In other words, the schools are not a place for "social engineering". I would argue that the schools have two functions, to educate our children in the 3Rs and to prepare them as good citizens in a democratic society. Public schools are (and have historically been) the place where society inculcates the next generation with the broader values of our society. The rapid growth of public education in the US over the last 100+ years has been predicated on the need to provide every member of society with an understanding and appreciation of our social, economic and political systems. Can we possibly accomplish that unless we promote equity in education? I don't think so.

A FINAL NOTE

It is my strong belief that we all share a sincere desire to improve public education - for our children and for all children. I think that can best be accomplished with a spirited debate that includes all perspectives, and it is my goal to promote such a debate. To the extent that I can, I will respond to postings (although my job right now is keeping me very busy and I hope much of the discussion can go on, even when I can't).

I also apologize for the length of this posting. As any of my former students, who have had the misfortune of asking me a question in class, can attest, lengthy responses are my modus operandi.

George Vlasits