One moment from high school I think about frequently. I was generally in honors classes in my large and diverse suburban high school. Yet, I was the kid who was sneaking by with the bare minimum work, and didn't cause trouble. I was happy to just be in classes with my friends! And from my observations, the better teachers taught honors classes, the work was more interesting and way less time was spent on behavior management.
I remember sitting in art class (which was an elective, not tracked, so they had a really different mix of kids in them.) and the announcements came on. The announcements listed the same 5-10 students winning multiple awards over the weekend for sports, academics, music, etc. A girl sitting next to me scoffed, "geez, give someone else a chance!" and I remember being SO SHOCKED by her opinion that only certain kids "had the chance" to do whatever. To my knowledge every single team and activity was desperate for more participation. I may have even engaged her more about this, I don't remember.
This comment, that pointed out a basic truth about my high school: a small percentage of high-acieving students had the privilege to participate in extra curricular activities AND then were publicly celebrated and awarded for doing so. This was widely known, but what I didn't realize at the time is that sports, music, etc. were not equal-opportunity options for all students. For some students, extra-curriculars were lame. But I think a lot of students had to watch younger siblings and have jobs outside of high school. Or they at least needed cars or friends with cars or parents to shuttle them around town to various events and practices. I didn't realize this barrier to entry until I was an adult.... Is the path to "just join!" actually open or is it full of obstacles I couldn't imagine?
There is no "just join" if there are any logistical obstacles. As soon as a parent has to get involved, kids whose parents are exhausted, busy, uninterested, or poor will be at a disadvantage.
I think an essential question is does detracking within a school increase tracking between schools. By this I mean that parents with resources (money, human capital) opt out of the detracked public school and send their children to either private or charter schools that continue to track students. This seems likely to exacerbate racial and class inequality despite the best intentions of educators.
That's an interesting question, although I'm not sure that we should continually bow to the preferences of parents who threaten or ultimately act on leaving a school trying to make a system more fair. In all of the schools I studied, however, this wasn't an issue because they kept the top classes and parents were happy to continue to have access to them for free versus the hassle of moving or paying for a private education. Although the sample size is admittedly very small, when I followed up with these schools, they've been experiencing an increase in enrollment at a time when public school enrollment as a whole has been decreasing.
This is the disaster occurring in Cleveland! We've always had a major issue with wealthy families sending kids to private schools to avoid the more integrated public schools. But recently, Shaker Heights (one of the only public schools that managed to remain about 50% Black/50% white over the past 50 years) detracked and parents of Black kids in honors classes are moving their kids elsewhere so they can continue to be tracked. There is a LOT of concern about the potential harm of detracking in this community.
I’m so glad to see this topic in this space. I am a teacher, curriculum designer, and former beneficiary of things like G&T programming and Honors/AP classes. I would never go back to tracking.*
The benefits of differentiated instruction, inclusion and co-teaching environments, and curriculum done with the tenets of Universal Design in mind have so many benefits — for me as a teacher and for students — from improved social skills to better behavior to more engagement. (There’s also an enormous amount of data on how teacher expectations shape student outcomes, so even if I didn’t have those positive experiences I still wouldn’t consider tracking — which is a way of conveying expectations ahead of time about who can succeed in a given class environment — to be ethically tenable, and would be motivated to explore different solutions.)
The way my colleagues and I think about Universal Design is like this: you make a buffet. In English, this means you pick a topic or a book, with many ways in: reading, watching videos, listening to audio, etc. You set up many ways to show your thinking: art, raps, presentations. Students choose what they need. (They’re usually very good at this.) Highly-skilled kids may still prefer learning with audio materials; struggling students may prefer the structure of a presentation to art; but everyone gets to experience and express themselves in ways that are rigorous and culturally responsive. It’s far preferable than saying to one batch of kids, “You are all getting burgers,” and to another, “You are all getting sushi.” Either way you’re likely not serving something that everyone likes, wants or needs. Offering “voice and choice” in every classroom makes it more likely that you will.
I would imagine that this way of approaching differentiation is explored in the book and something many teachers are already familiar with. But it’s something I think the general public should know more about as well. If you “take something away,” it’s always better to offer a clear and positive vision of what can replace it. This is something that’s already happening across K-12, and while nothing in K-12 is perfect, I think “the buffet” still works very well, for more people, than the alternatives.
*eta: I think we can still offer access to course types like AP (which can help all students better afford college) while still engaging in these best practices, and offering these opportunities to the majority of students vs a minority. But there’s nuance here and I’m open to other POVs on this as well, since I may share some of the same positive biases toward AP specifically as the folks above.
I’m really conflicted about this. My kids attended a Catholic elementary school and then a suburban public high school with a reputation for good academics. The detracking movement was just getting going and it was the height of the “college for all” fad. The high school made the decision to allow anybody to enroll in honors classes, which made sense, but didn’t materially change the demographics in the honors/AP track. The counselors and teachers genuinely cared and worked hard to get kids with potential to try honors, but after a couple of years of that the new administration tried to just get rid of the honors track altogether. Hoooo boy…you want to see ugliness? Try taking advanced classes away from parents who are doctors, attorneys, and academics. I’m surprised that guy isn’t buried under the goalposts on the football field.
If schools want to offer rigorous academics and make those classes the norm, then I’m fine with detracking, but the idea that you take away things like 8th grade algebra or HS calculus in order to reduce inequity is a terrible idea. Kids whose parents don’t have clout or resources will suffer, where wealthy parents will just hire tutors or put their kids in private school so that they can have advanced academics.
I think this is my hang up with detracking as it gets discussed around me. It always comes down to the idea of cutting the enrichment rather than expanding the enrichment which to me defeats the purpose. We need to offer that high level to as many students as possible because they can rather than just decide "on level" types of curriculum are the best. If we did smaller classes and more intervention earlier on we could feasibly do this too.
That's really interesting to me. Taking away the top level isn't something I hear discussed in my research. We did have many conversations at my high school about limiting the number of AP classes a kid could take because of all the stress and burnout, but I think that's a different conversation. If you could point me in the direction of some districts who seem to be getting it backward, I'd love to take a look!
I don't know how much of it is scare mongering in the Deep South, but like Louisiana already thinks teachers are more or less the enemy indoctrinating children. I've sat in curriculum meetings where the idea of teaching algebra I to 8th graders is seen as a negative because not all students are ready. To me, ensuring more students are ready for algebra I is a better goal than delaying it.
The Catholic school my kids went to offered algebra in 8th grade and the challenge the principal had was telling about half of the parents that their kid wasn’t ready for algebra, and if they pushed, it would end in tears. He was a huge proponent of Jean Piaget’s theory of development, and his argument was that a lot of 12 year olds just aren’t developmentally ready for the abstract nature of algebra, and pushing them into it early will make them hate math.
As a kid who always did well at math and was tracked into early algebra where I hit a complete wall—I had NO idea what was going on, and I avoided math like the plague after that until college, when I took basic algebra and did pretty well….it wasn’t my sweet spot, but I learned it…his argument resonated with me.
Take a look at Seattle Public Schools. About 5 years ago they proposed eliminating the Highly Capable program and there was a big backlash so I don’t know if they ended up going forward with that idea. They also proposed “humanizing” math by introducing lessons about math creating systems of oppression or something.
I deeply appreciate that Dr. Thornton is a former classroom teacher (you're never really a former classroom teacher). Too many people making decisions about education have never had to sit across from a parent to deliver news that will disappoint their dreams for their child or navigated the exhaustion of a school year.
Like you, AHP, I have painfully mixed feelings about detracking. My once a week Gifted class was a social haven where I wasn't bullied and I didn't have to worry about being bored. I could just be me. I always resented being asked to be a mini-teacher's assistant. My classmates hated it, too. It occurs to me, however, that none of that is about academics. It's all about culture and community. It is possible to build a different world.
As a 1st /2nd grade teacher at a VERY Fancy Pants Independent School in Seattle (if you live in Seattle & have kids you know which one I'm talking about), my colleagues and I were tasked with creating individualized curriculum for each of our students. We designed lessons as a team of six. It was a lot of work but it wasn't impossible. What I loved about that approach was that no one was "behind" or "ahead". It was okay to nail multiplication and need more support with subtraction. It was okay to have a day where you showed up as your inner six year old even though you were almost eight. Part of what made that possible is that we focused on competencies rather than learning objectives. We had detailed rubrics. We didn't use textbooks. It was an inquiry based approach. (Racism still existed in the school- it just became behavior based. I lasted one year.)
I think detracking is much more possible if you don't try to shove it into the existing learning model. As a skills-based hiring champion now, I want schools to rethink how education happens. The workplace isn't tracked. And there are no quizzes or final exams. If we start the competency conversation from the beginning, this all gets easier.
Good point. I've been in the education / nonprofit space & I've spent the last four years in a series of gap jobs while I look for my next career move. So I guess I'm fully off track? I have never participated in that realm.
The WORST example of this is actually tied to K - 12 tracking. The big branded consulting companies recruit directly from Ivy League schools (which are only accessible to kids who have hit all the right marks on the track). Ancillary consulting companies & businesses then seek people with "Big Four consulting experience". I'm just wondering how I was supposed to know any of this when I was 10.
You were not supposed to know this when you were 10 but most likely some of the adults around you did. I grew up very, very poor and went to the worst high school in our city. Our school was not diverse (our city was 94% white at the time) but we were known as the 'white trash' school. Most people came from single parent households, incarcerated parents, parents with serious drug and alcohol issues etc. I clearly remember being laughed at by other schools at a basketball tournament because we were the only school who could not afford to stay at a hotel ( we literally slept on the floor of a math classroom and used the change rooms to shower) and who had packed 3 days' worth of food because we could not afford to eat out. I was labelled 'bright' though and put in enriched/gifted classes and sent to conferences (sponsored by donors) where my eyes were opened to so much that I otherwise never would have seen/known. Adults at my school knew that formal higher education was my way out and they were right. I now work for one of these consulting houses that you refer to. As the parent of a college freshman and a sophomore high schooler, my issue isn't so much with tracking in and of itself but the 'ranking' of the tracking i.e. you are better if you are in the college track than the trades track. No everyone should go/needs to go to college but kids are made to feel less than if they do not want to go. Many of my high school peers were "tracked "for trades and are now plumbers/electricians etc. and are productive members of society... no more, no less than I am. I think the bigger issue is that we have to get away from college being the gold standard for all.
No one around me knew any of this. I grew up in a family of educators, factory workers, & urban policy wonks. I attended a small blue collar high school in a fading industrial community where graduating from high school was still an achievement & getting into Penn State Main Campus was a big deal. They introduced AP classes almost a decade after I graduated. There is so much tacit knowledge that wasn't available but is now thanks to the internet.
I have been working to eliminate the perceived "need" for college degrees for years now, helping employers set up apprenticeships in non-trade sectors, championing competency based job analysis, and even just asking questions like "What useful information does a person's college degree give you?". That alone blows people's minds. They'll say things like "Well, it's evidence that they can complete something." And then I ask "Are there other ways to get that information?" What a college degree requirement actually signals is culture & it points toward answering "Will this person fit in here?"
yes!! Finishing a trade school shows you that someone can 'complete something' Seeing something that someone built shows you that someone can 'complete something' Watching someone train for a marathon and then do one shows you that someone can 'complete something'!! We need to change the conversation
My dad graduated from high school in 1950 and had a long career as a photojournalist. He worked up to chief of photography at the Oregonian before quitting to freelance for National Geographic, People, Sunset, NY Times, etc., all without a college degree. My 3 sisters and I all went to four year colleges (3 private and one public), and have between us three masters and a PhD.
Our kids went to a) Very Fancy Art College, b) local private college, c) community college, d) off-and-on at state universities until eventually a degree e) culinary institute after dropping out of a four year program, and my teen is planning to do 2 years at a community college before going to the local state university to finish a bachelors. I don't think a four year degree is expected in quite the same way anymore? The older kids are all doing fine; three own homes and all are employed. When I graduated in '87 and headed off to a fancy New England private school, I would have been horrified at any of the above options besides A and B. But my niece the art school grad is the only one with insane debt in her 30s, working a job that has very little to do with her degree. (And my nephew the private school grad majored in accounting because he's just that guy.)
Sounds to me though like most started with the idea of a 4 year degree and then veered from there? Wouldn't have it been nice if the one who ended up doing culinary school did it from the get go and potentially saved themselves the cost of a 4 year college? I was just astounded last year when my daughter was graduating high school how going to college was the best way and everything else was less. Even the 2 hour post secondary meeting at school was 1 hour and 45 minutes spent on 4 year college, 10 minutes on community college and 5 minutes on trades. The message was clear to all what the 'best' avenue was...
I'm so conflicted about this. On the one hand, a college education is still the surest path to the middle class in this country and gives a person many more option than learning a single trade. On the other, that's an exceptionally dumb way to run an economy. What I find troubling, however, is that parental education level continues to be one of the largest factors in students' educational levels and schools essentially become social reproduction factories. I think it would be ideal if we could find a way to divorce these statistics so that all students were making a free choice and that everyone was assured of having their needs met regardless of the career path they chose.
Parental education & zip code. Because it's also about income. The K-12 system 100% replicates privilege because of the way we assign and fund schools.
I deeply question the conventional wisdom around the power of college degrees because it turns out that it isn't just a college degree. If you go to a community college, if you go to an online school, if you go to a for-profit school, if you go to a diploma mill school- any of those factors & the weight / access of a college degree fades. Tressie McMillan Cottom's "Lower Education" unpacks this brilliantly.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you said 'this country' So many European countries track and have a wonderful middle class that is not all college educated citizens. Germany is a great example of this. I guess it is a bit of a 'chicken and egg' situation... do you try and change the attitude that college in the be all end all first and then kids can make decisions about their future based on interest and skill/aptitude or do you try and send everyone to college just to realize that this leads to people realizing that college may not have been the best choice for them?
I'm also not sure we can look to Europe here! Tracking in Europe tends to also largely be based on students' demographic factors, including parents' educational levels. I also saw a study a few years ago showing that adults who were in different tracks in European schools tended to have statistically different health outcomes. I'd like to see a system where students are truly making a free choice with negative impacts.
There are so many trades that guarantee six-figure salaries after a few years of apprenticeship. Plumbers and electricians are in many cases in better financial situations than physicians at age 35. It's insane to me that our goal is to send every kid to college to get a degree that may not benefit them (sorry sociology) when so many would be better served by a trade.
" My once a week Gifted class was a social haven where I wasn't bullied and I didn't have to worry about being bored. I could just be me. I always resented being asked to be a mini-teacher's assistant. My classmates hated it, too. It occurs to me, however, that none of that is about academics. It's all about culture and community. It is possible to build a different world."
This resonated with me so much. I went to an independent school. I was always tracked into "the highest X class". That's what we called it, as students. No one told us this group of kids was in the hardest math or reading class, but we all figured it out. I have extremely vivid memories of my 2nd grade reading class. It was this beautiful space of learning and creativity. It felt like play rather than work because of the joy all of my fellow students had for reading and learning. It was one space where I wasn't viewed as snobby for being shy and nerdy (can't tell you how many people got to know me later and told me they thought I was a snob). I loved it so much. I can completely see all the ways tracking is problematic, even as I recognize the ways it benefited me personally - in a college admissions type of way but also in that it taught me learning is fun and joyful when you're in an environment where your needs are seen at met. I wonder how schools can create a culture of deep joy and fun in learning?
This is it exactly, Rachel. ALL of schooling should feel the way Gifted / "college prep" classes felt: spaces where curiosity was encouraged, exploration was supported, and where you could just be who you are. That's not an "intelligence" thing. That's a learning environment thing. The obsession with measurement, pathologizing, and industrializing education does not allow for this. Nor does the way we train teachers. Nor does the way we obsess over school test scores.
It seems to me that Dr Thornton basically is talking about the need for a new type of school rather than simple rejiggering of the old sort. Your school in Seattle seems like what she is looking for.
Oh this is interesting! I had no idea what this was called, but experienced it vividly - and not positively - as a kid. (Edit to note: this experience was 1970s through the 80s, for comparative reference to other's experiences.)
Apparently my sister and I were "tracked". Interestingly enough, we ended up in entirely different situations. We were both bright, reading a lot, with parents who could and did take us to museums and libraries, etc. all the time. Even so, my sister was tracked into "Gifted and Talented" as the track was called and I was tracked into "Regular". Note throughout this that I present more with more of my father's South Asian appearance than my sister who presents more with the white appearance of our Nordic mother.
I found most of school unchallenging to the point that I'd daydream, flip through my books and skip homework. I took refuge in the school library in the morning (god bless librarians) and adored my science and art teachers who gave me interesting things to work on. But for the most part, school was where I helped my fellow students understand what the teacher was saying, or how to write a paper, and where I tried to make myself invisible from the mean or bullying students while still visible to the teacher. I got daily reminders that my sister's classes were more interesting and covered subjects in more depth and breadth, that her assignments involved some creativity and less rote memorization, and that her teachers didn't seem burned out, would learn her name and even would speak to my parents about things to keep her engaged.
And then came along Standardized Testing. And suddenly I was yanked out of "Regular" and placed in an "Advanced" English class, a Creative Writing class and introduced to pre-algebra. Overnight school became fun and I went from Bs and Cs to straight As. The difference in how I was taught was SHOCKING and obvious to me, even as a 7th grader.
And then our school district made some significant efforts to integrate a bit better at the high school level. Everyone from my poor-area junior high school, whether white, black or hispanic, regardless of what level classes they were in at the junior high, ended up in "Regular" or "Basic" classes at the rich-white-area high school we were integrated into. I was so very much NOT going back to that situation and fought for a year to get placed back into Advanced classes. I did, even ending up in some classes where there were GT students. Apparently I wrote better and got better grades than they did and one of my English teachers used a A I got on a test to shame the other students into doing better.
I utterly, utterly despised the system. I can't even put into words how much I hated it. It was enough that I gave serious thought to never putting my own children (if I would have had kids; I never did) through public school. Honestly, I feel like I eventually graduated in the upper 20% of my high school despite it and because I actively struggled against it. But I never knew what it was called.
One thing that I think warrants further exploration is the meeting the needs of the actual gifted students. Kids that are two standard deviations ahead of the norm really should be considered special education just like kids two standard deviations below are. Specialized instruction for both groups likely would lead to the best gains. I know that in some states gifted is special education, but it's not everywhere.
As a classroom teacher who admittedly is teaching only AP classes this year, I worry that class size alone makes detracking extremely difficult. It's hard enough to meet varied needs in a more homogenous class than one that in high school could span reading levels from elementary to college ready. Classes of 30 do not lend themselves well to anything but teaching to the middle due to the number of hours required to prep lessons. My students have commented on how much more laid back their honors and AP classes are in terms of behavior and that most people are ready to do the work in those classes in comparison to the non-honors version. I don't know if there is a great solution for engagement, but I'm always willing to explore other options to raise the tide for all boats.
Philosophically I like the idea of detracking, but the practicalities of it at the high school level concern me in terms of making an already difficult job almost impossible. I think it's something we would need to start at an elementary level and move up rather than disband it k-12 all at once. Without smaller classes though I'm not sure it's feasible on a large scale.
A million times yes to the real enemy being large class sizes, from another high-school teacher here. If you want detracking to actually work, cut my class size in half. I can’t give individualized attention to 30+ kids. The bigger and more heterogeneous the class, the more of my energy goes to classroom management and sheer logistics.
I can't differentiate for 35+kids for four block periods a day. I simply don't have the energy. I can do my best and then will feel super guilty that it will never be enough because I'm playing whack a mole with classroom management.
Yes, class size is a huge factor, and every school I studied had to make their class sizes smaller to make detracking feasible. All of the schools also worked closely with their feeder schools to also do some type of detracking that mirrored what was happening at the high school level. Where I can't agree, however, is the idea of making gifted education similar to special education. First, we lack accurate measures of giftedness. When you talk about standard deviations above the norm, the test that is producing those scores is largely rooted in eugenics (I know this sounds super dramatic, but it really is true: https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/time-to-shift-away-from-standardized-testing). We have to have better measures that aren't culturally biased and simply reflect students' existing opportunities before we can rely on them to determine what access students have to resources. I also live in a state where gifted education is treated as a type of special education and students can get a gifted IEP. This system is ripe for manipulation by well-resourced parents. I often think that one solution would be IEPs for everyone and a focus on mastery as someone downthread mentioned, but until we can change our first principles in US education, that would also probably be manipulated by parents who (understandably!) want to get more resources for their kids and have the time and inclination to do it.
I guess my question is what do we do the precocious math students who are working multiple grades ahead? Do we just keep drilling them on middle school math skills or do we allow them to keep growing? I actually very much agree on a mastery based approach because it would benefit all students. Where I struggle is that no one seems to care at all about the kids who are bored in class. I didn't find the help peers who are struggling out or do busy work a satisfactory answer when I was a student, and have seen students aren't satisfied with that today. I teach in a majority minority title 1 school so I'm not in a wealthy area, and our top kids are getting so much less than the private schools near us. We are a non magnet district school so we don't pick out our students. It just sucks to know they are going to be behind when they head off to college compared to the kids in Catholic school nearby.
My brother and I were reminiscing about our grade school educations recently. We grew up in in a middle-class suburban district that was at the time 100% white—this was before fair housing laws. The teachers were a mix of young women and older women who had returned to work after their kids had grown up, so I am guessing they got their teacher’s training roughly when my grandmother did..late 1920’s and early 1930’s. Third grade math was spent teaching multiplication and division. Our teacher was very old, and very “mean,” but she had everybody proficient at the end of the year. I realize now she had differentiated instruction down to a science. She explained multiplication and then she had a variety of activities available for practice—worksheets, manipulative, pictures, flash cards. After she taught, there was a work period where kids picked out an activity and practiced. There was a big chart at the front of the room with everybody’s name on it and when you felt you had memorized a set of multiplication facts well enough to be tested, you walked up to her desk and told her what you wanted to demonstrate. She’d ask “2x2” and you’d give the answer…and she’d go through the “2’s” or whichever set you wanted to show you knew. If you got 100% you got a star in the box on the chart for that set of problems. When your chart was full, you could pick an activity to work on during math practice time.
As more and more kids finished up their multiplication tables, it left a smaller group for her to work with on what they needed to learn. The 1:1 recitation gave her insight into who was having trouble and possibly where that trouble might be. There were incentives to getting through the tables…your chart was full of colorful stars AND once you were finished you could do an activity that was more enjoyable like read or draw or color—or help another kid by drilling them with flash cards.
She was in many ways an awful woman (by the time my brother had her there were a couple of Black kids in the school and he remembers her being really vicious to them) but NOBODY got out of third grade without memorizing multiplication and simple division facts.
Could those kids be working on math-related projects related to their school or community? I was an English teacher, but all of my students had a year-long project they worked on (mostly) independently in addition to our units, so when students wrapped up work or mastered a concept, they had time to work on these projects. I'd love to talk with you more about organizing these projects if you're interested!
Right now my school pushes these kids (about 25 seniors and 20 juniors) into dual enrollment classes at the local college. Which basically feels like we wash our hands of having to meet their needs. I think this actually causes accessibility issues in terms of IEP, 504, and ELL students because those opportunities aren't provided to those students due to colleges dealing with disability differently and requiring act/sat scores at levels commensurate with admission standards.
I just really think we should be doing better for kids in the building and not offloading them to a system that isn't meant for dealing with 15 year olds.
I'm a huge fan of Tomlinson, and wish administrators would actually embrace her work in a practical way on a whole school level. Embrace the time required to prep, don't limit copies for teachers, and accept that growth may not always be linear for all kids, but will come if we meet their needs.
State standards of course are a separate but not unrelated nightmare. If we meet kids where they are, and view things as big picture not just a calendar school year things would be a lot better.
I'm thinking too about how I was identified as gifted probably largely because I started reading at age 3 and never stopped. BUT...I didn't have a TV, had five people at home who both read to me and modeled reading for pleasure, and had ready access to books at home and in the public library as well as at school. Am I gifted, or am I just normally intelligent and given special support and incentive? (In the 70s and 80s if you didn't have a TV, books were pretty much your only other option for stories.)
I would be really interested to know more details about the new system at Johnson HS -- because from this brief discussion, it sounds like they eliminated tracking and replaced it with...different tracking. So they have life-skills classes, as they should, but then it sounds very much to me like they've pulled students with lesser but still significant special needs into a "small track that doesn’t include IB for students who don’t need the life skills program but don’t feel prepared for the IB program." (What does "don't feel prepared" mean? Does the student make that determination? The teachers? The parents? Are they "unprepared" -- i.e. have insufficient preparation, maybe because they entered the district later and didn't participate in pre-IB, in which case maybe prepare them?? -- or does the school consider them "unable" to be successful? Those are really different.)
So sure, they "don't have tracking" anymore, but they also don't have inclusion. What percentage of IEP students are "untracked" vs. placed in the "small track"?
(I don't have a better solution, to be clear; I taught for ten years and then bailed like more and more teachers are doing. But reading an article where the one example of detracking *is still tracking* makes me fairly skeptical.)
This gestures to something that I and other parents I talk to have had trouble with in these conversations, which is that de-tracking always seems to mean only one thing and that thing is taking programs away from more advanced kids. If you want to say "fine, just one class and we teach to the median student--no IEPs, no additional support for kids that fall behind" that would be detracking right? It would also be a return to what I think of as a mid-century system that was really quite bad. But no one ever proposes that, the proposal is always that kids that need extra support get all the extra support we can muster, the median students get a curriculum that is designed with them in mind, and the kids that are ahead get... nothing. (I also have a lot more to say about the race and class dynamics of this because my experience as a parent in a reasonably diverse New York City school that recently eliminated a G&T program is that it is not necessarily the wealthier or whiter parents that are pushing for more testing, tracking, homework and what not, especially in lower grades.)
This touches on the source of my conflicted feelings about de-tracking - I hear friends say things like “giftedness isn’t real, it is just the way wealthy parents hoard educational resources” and like, there is SO much truth to the argument that G&T programs operate that way in practice, but at the same time: gifted children do exist and have specific needs as a result. It always feels weird to talk about this because people have the impression (maybe partly because the word “gifted” itself suggests that someone is being given advantages) that gifted kids are already fortunate and anything we do for them is just giving more to those who have more already…but as a kid who was “diagnosed” as “profoundly gifted” as a kid, I think it’s better to think of it as a kind of neurodivergence that requires particular accommodations (and also, so many of us are what gets called “2E”, too).
There was no world in which I was ever going to have a “normal” school experience…in NC I was absolutely being tracked and would’ve have gone to the “gifted” school starting in 3rd grade if we hadn’t moved away. In MN, they didn’t do that kind of tracking, but once they got over their prejudice about southern accents, they created a special sort of IEP for me that let me bounce around to different grade levels and specific teachers for independent study until I was old enough to do PSEO (taking college classes while in HS). So I’ve experienced both the tracked and “untracked but provided with opportunities that met my needs” versions of education that were on offer in the late 80’s-2001
My social/educational justice commitments put me on the side of wanting less tracking IF the tracking of simply reinforcing existing wealth and racial disparities, which does seem to be true of most tracking…but I worry a LOT about the kids who needs won’t get met, especially the “gifted” who so many assume don’t have needs. I can say with confidence (as a person who has lived with the kind of existential depression that is typical amongst “gifted” kids) that if I hadn’t gotten the kinds of “accommodations” I got throughout school as a “gifted” kid, I quite likely wouldn’t be alive today.
You have expressed what I struggled to. It's something I see in a handful of high school students every year. The quiet desperation of kids who aren't getting what they need because it's more. I think about 2E kids a lot in this discussion. Neurodivergence is a really good way to think about it because it is a neurodivergence. I know there are large issues with classifying gifted, but some kids are.
This. My kid and I are both '2E' and his experiences in school are just SO much better/easier because he was diagnosed young (don't get me started on how many neurodivergent girls are missed) AND because we're able to afford a really good private school that is able to challenge him in the areas he excels at and push him in the areas he's behind in (mild dyscalulia). While he complains about school he's not experiencing being bullied for being smart, having teachers get annoyed at him for asking too many questions/reading too far ahead or being made into a mini teacher (you understand this, go tutor your peers) which neurodivergent 11 yr old me wasn't interested in or prepared to do from a social skills angle!
OMG, neurodivergent kids are so NOT prepared to teach other kids! We don't have the social skills, and if we're gifted, we don't even understand what the other kids struggle with. I sure didn't. The triviality thresholds are just too far apart.
This conversation severely needs a lot more neurodivergent input.
I think part of my resistance as a teacher as I definitely loathed that as a kid, and your peers often DO NOT WANT help from someone who might make them feel lesser due to social skills or just insecurity. As an introverted, adhd (diagnosed as an adult), formerly gifted kid and now AP teacher I'm really careful about what I do in groups because nurturing fragile peer relations is really important for a happy classroom.
My competitive private high school that I attended really drove home the idea of hard work being important so effort, and doing school right were definitely commended along with achievement. There was a sense of the question is not "will you meet the standards, but how what will we do to get you there?" It was so incredible to be in small, highly focused classes with other kids who participated and did the work outside of class because being a smart kid was cool. There was no belief that being smart was simply innate, though we were a privileged bunch for sure, but there was a lot of "you are being give lm opportunities, so take advantage of them!"
I have major gender concerns about girls being made to be peer helpers in classrooms due to being more compliant and docile too (that I just realized). Those were some of the most miserable elementary experiences for me. I still remember not getting my week with the double desk alone (not having a partner) that I was so thrilled about because I was a good example. Formerly selectively mute me loved being alone as a kid with my books or imagination.
Giftedness is in fact a kind of neurodivergence that requires particular accommodations.
I'm 3E (giftedness, ADHD, autism), and I have very much experienced the mental illness-inducing boredom you're describing, but the public school system had always been like, "F*** you, you don't even exist, kid."
When I was 25 and struggling in college, I had mass murder ideation for a few weeks, which only stopped when an actual mass murder happened in my city. Academic neglect is serious.
I am painfully aware that I'm part of a tiny minority. The suggested piecemeal solutions for people like me feel half-assed: I don't learn well on my own, so being banished to the library wouldn't have worked; anything involving parents wouldn't have worked either, because my parents really couldn't be bothered, even though they were not struggling financially.
I'm sorry, I just don't have solutions. This wound has only just started healing. I'm 43 years old.
You and I are the same age, and I'm so sorry you experienced that. The part about solutions for the kids that need more feeling halfassed is really valid because so many solutions are you can take an online course in the library or you can help peers.
We haven't even touched on the teachers who actively resent exceptionally capable kids because they don't fit the mold, and can be more challenging in the classroom. I've seen too many people in my field want to take gifted kids down a few pegs because "they aren't as smart as they think they are," but the flip side is the kid is often significantly smarter than the adult claiming this. Teachers mostly hate being challenged, but there are times they should be!
That is so true, what you say about teachers who resent exceptionally capable kids that don't fit the mold.
After I worked hard on my mother for her to push the school to let me skip a grade, my 4th grade teacher despised me and let the class girlboss bully me every single day, smirking at the bully's antics. I felt sick in my stomach every day before going to school. I remember developing depression during that exact year, what with my parents not doing anything about it on top of everything else.
I share this concern, but I think it's really important to differentiate between students who are simply diligent (something our system really values) or who appear advanced because of the lack of rigor in gen ed classes, and students who are academically advanced to the point where it's essentially a special need. This is a *really small* percentage of kids.
I only taught at one middle school where I really felt like all students' needs were being met. This school had the vast majority of students in the "regular" English and math classes, which were sufficiently rigorous that kids were well prepared to go into AP classes in high school (this was, not surprisingly, a well resourced school in a well resourced town). There was one small section of advanced English, and when I say advanced -- I teach college now, and I use some of the same lessons and projects with my first- and second-year college students as I did with my eighth graders, and they're not always as successful as my junior high kids were. This was about 15 kids in each class of 200+. In math, some kids were a grade or two ahead, and kids who were advanced beyond that self-studied in the library or got bussed to the high school.
The mainstream classes were genuinely challenging, so kids whose test scores were in the bottom 20% or so (of our school, which put them just below the median nationally) got extra support in the form of an extra class period of English and/or math *every single day*, in lieu of an elective class. These classes had five or six kids in them and ran parallel to the gen ed class. They covered the same topic that the gen ed class covered that day, but with only six kids in the class, students could ask lots of questions, the teacher could find and fill in any gaps in their previous knowledge, and they could get extra practice with the material. Most kids were only in these parallel support classes for a term or two, but they were pretty fluid, so students would move in and out of them as needed. The goal, always, was to bring kids "up to speed" in the regular class, and it *worked*. Many students who transferred into our district ended up in these classes, at least for a while.
Science and social studies were the same for all of the students (except some life skills kids); some of those classes were co-taught. Same with electives. It worked exceptionally well. Students got what they needed. It was also incredibly expensive, because it turns out that good education costs a lot of money.
This differentiation between dilligent and gifted in a "special needs" capacity is so, so important — it reminds me of the conversation a few months ago with Ana Homayoun re: "student success," and how much of our current understanding of a very good student (as in, organized and diligent) is mapped onto this understanding of "gifted" (and how it isn't great for anyone involved)
Your comment resonates with me. In all schooling prior to high school, I was diligent (but not challenged intellectually—but I didn’t know that at the time), and that diligence really did carry so much weight.
Too much weight, perhaps, since later on that was absolutely not enough.
Such a good point. Diligence, reasonable intelligence, and the ability to "do school" are great tools for academic success, but do not equal "giftedness." And while I love the model you describe, I feel like it would only be that successful in the community you describe. I'm currently at a k-5 school that is highly impacted by poverty and trauma, and while the kids of course have the intellectual ability to do what you're talking about, there are so many behaviors and unmet needs getting in the way that instead they are getting further and further behind. My school has a dual language immersion program, so one class per grade level is made up of Spanish speaking students whose parents enrolled them in that. Just the simple act of having parents who were able to navigate the system to that extent means that these classes are essentially our "high level" classes. And although I'm glad for them that they get non-chaotic classrooms, I also know that the rest of our school would benefit from having more kids who know how to "do school" in their classes.
I'm so sorry that's been your experience! Historically, tracking began in the late 19th century with an influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Educational bureaucrats considered them white enough to go to white high schools but not white enough to be in the college prep classes. All of the examples in the book and the schools with which I continue to work aren't working on taking things away from more advanced kids. One example is in Charlottesville, Virginia where they expanded enrichment classes in elementary school so that all kids took them like they take music, art, PE, etc. The enrichment teachers then also were freed up to work with the general ed teachers to plan enrichment opportunities for kids in the general ed classroom who were already doing work "above" grade-level. This model is becoming more ubiquitous and is also sort of mirrored at the high school level by the schools in my book that opened up levels rather than taking away the top one.
👆🏻I am going to have to mull this article over before I give a full response but I am in year 27 in the classroom and I am very cynical when someone leaves the classroom after a few trans pops back up with a solution that “teachers just have to do this.” Please. There is no “just” and rarely is there infrastructure or fortitude to actually follow through on these reforms. So they are a momentary flash in the pan that gets press but rarely is still in place 5-10 years later.
I hope you will think about it more! I also hope my writing accurately reflects my belief that student sorting isn't about something only teachers have to do but rather a holistic process that involves students, communities, and school leaders. In fact, my book focuses specifically on school leaders and their work as does my overall research and teaching. The school highlighted in the interview above has been doing this work for over 20 years, so I don't think it's a flash in the pan by any means. I left working in a high school for a research career because I saw how successful our program was for our students and wanted to figure out why and how other schools could potentially replicate this success. I would have stayed if I had felt like I could have that kind of impact on the larger system while still teaching high schoolers as opposed to adults.
I definitely will think about it more and try to give a more nuanced response later today. I can only speak to my experience and let me tell you, the only way I have survived in education as long as I have is through pure grit (and a lack of other options in my community). Telling new teachers that they have to have five differentiated lessons in each class is not only unrealistic, it’s downright cruel. The path of least resistance is to make one that everyone can do (dumb down the curriculum). I can see how this COULD work in a functional district but I have a lot of anecdotal information from teachers across the country that shows most are dysfunctional. So I feel it becomes an ideal versus real world discussion and I reside firmly in the real world.
In my district we have gone away from tracking in a traditional way but have gone to a voluntary school within a school that students have to apply to and then teachers pick who gets to participate. It has created the most sickening form of elitism and privilege. That would make an interesting case study of how an attempt to provide supports for non college bound students can go sideways and turn into the opposite of what it was billed as.
I wish I could have gone into more detail about this in the interview! They absolutely do have inclusion. Most kids with IEPs are in the pre-IB program as are most students at the high school. The pre-IB classes are largely co-taught between general and special education teachers. In terms of numbers, there are ~20 kids out of the school of 2000 in life skills and another 20 or so in the non-IB program. The decisions are made by the families, school people, and student together, usually after the students has tried pre-IB. There are also more examples of other schools in the book (not to shill, just nodding to space constraints).
I really think that we need to get away from thinking that IB is the be all, end all and to promote all 'tracks' college/community college/trades as being equally as valuable and not 'less than'. My kids were/are at an IB integrated high school where they get to select full IB for grades 11 and 12. Both kids have decided against IB in those grades. Teachers/parents were telling me that I should push my kids into the IB because of its "prestige". Choosing not to go IB has made 0 difference to my daughter's college acceptances and 0 difference to her academic success in her freshman year.
The thing is though that for kids without protective factors such parental education, racial privilege, class privilege, etc., the tracks currently aren't equally valuable. Coming from a poorly-resourced, rural high school to UVA, I really struggled, and I think I would have struggled even more without the handful of AP classes my school offered. I also doubt I would have gotten into UVA without taking them. As an educator, I think I am constantly struggling between the world as it is and the world as I would like it to be.
I felt the same when I got to university. It was very clear that my very "low class" school did not prepare me for the rigours of University..... and I am not sure that this would have been any different though had my school been untracked. I still think that a huge part of the answer is getting away from valuing some tracks more than others. I am also 100% aware that this is so much easier said than done.
I think co-teaching is a huge help when it's set up well. I remain curious about the kids in the small track -- could they be successful in pre-IB with more support? If not, why not? Does it tend to be kids with behavioral issues? Even if most of the students with IEPs are in pre-IB, what percentage of kids in this small track have IEPs? And what are the offerings like for those students?
It's not behavior-based but more student and parent initiated after trying the pre-IB program. Those students are still in the same classroom as the IB class. They just don't take the IB test. They only take the state test required for graduation. This group is so small, the school couldn't report out IEP status because it would be too easy to then identify students.
So it sounds like tracking is where kids are placed according to where their test scores/grades (even from years before) put them, i.e. you scored well enough on a standardized test in elementary school to be labeled “gifted” and then you’re tracked into higher level classes unless you opt out (this was my experience, though by the time my sister—3 years younger—was at my HS they’d created the IB program, which had more rigorous requirements but was also more encompassing of high performing students who had not been placed in “gifted” classes). So is detracking where there is more individual choice for higher level classes or where the higher level classes are just the regular classes?
My kids’ educational experiences have been split between two schools: a private, college prep Episcopal school and a suburban public school. In the private school, tracking started in seventh grade with math class. It eventually became as stratified in HS as my experience in the 90s was—essentially, you have the same people in every core class for 4 years. I think there is some choice when it comes to AP classes, but non-AP, more “advanced” classes were entirely dependent upon performance and teacher recommendation. When my daughter—now a junior—was in 8th grade, they brought the honors English teacher in to her classroom to talk about the class and how great it was, but then it turned out you could only be in the class if your 8th grade teacher thought you should be in it. She didn’t make whatever the cut was and was disappointed. We moved in the interim and she started at the public school for ninth grade.
The experience here has been wholly different. Here kids choose a pathway, which funnels them into classes related to what they think they may want to do. There are dozens of pathways ranging from things like construction to health to culinary to a kind of pre-law. Those are your elective classes and then for core, kids can choose from whatever is offered—typically regular, honors, or AP if there is one. In addition to that, every kid takes an AP class their freshman and sophomore years. This is to introduce kids who may be unfamiliar with it to AP, and, I think, to help show kids and their parents who may be less inclined, or in a different system less selected, that they have the capability to do well in a class that is rigorous and challenging.
I’ve been really so much more encouraged by the way this school is set up: my daughter is able to choose classes that challenge her and has teachers who recognize her potential and push her to meet it, which wasn’t the case at the private, tracked school. I don’t know if this is an example of de-tracking, but it’s been so refreshing to feel like the tyranny of the labeling a kid through placing them in certain classes has been removed.
So many thoughts about this! In elementary school in the 70s, I was in a very early version of gifted programming and loved it. I was tracked in high school in the 80s. First quarter of junior year there was a scheduling issue and I took "regular" English. While the advanced class was reading Macbeth, the regular class was...studying commas. I looked around at my classmates, and knew that they could also handle Macbeth, and was pissed on their behalf. I have a dear friend who was in these regular classes, and she says she felt dumb because of that.
I'm in year 26 of teaching, and have seen a big push to eliminate barriers to AP or advanced or whatever-you-call-the-high-track classes. My biggest personal experience with detracking is when I was teaching reading workshop at the middle school. For two years I had classes of students who tested 2-4 years below grade level in reading but did not have an identified learning disability and who were not currently in the ELD classes. I liked it. Then I managed to convince someone to let kids who love reading also be in the class, and WOW. The difference in mood, engagement, and even community was huge. I did that for another five years, give or take a pandemic, then when my school decided to go back to only having "low" readers, and putting them in a canned program instead of letting me teach a love of reading, I quit. (Well, I managed to find another job first, because my need to eat overshadows my need to make a point.)
I see the pendulum that EVERYTHING in education subscribes to affecting this as well. People identify a problem: tracking is clearly and obviously racist, classist, and is also not the best way to serve students with varying needs. But in the rush to de-track, many schools dump kids who aren't prepared into classes with teachers who don't have the time to plan differentiated lessons that will reach all kids, and everyone does worse, so now we have a new problem. Detracking as explained by Dr. Thornton and supporters of Universal Design does sound like a better solution to me, but too many districts adopt things half-heartedly, without sufficient planning or training, and then throw their hands up when it "doesn't work."
Thank you for this. I have a lot of childhood baggage associated with tracking—surrounded by smart siblings and smart friends, I was the dumb one who the teachers didn’t think was smart enough for gifted and talented. My mom had to make a bit of a fuss to get me into AP classes in high school, and I did just fine when given the chance, though was never able to catch up in math. Which is its own can of worms...what about all the capable children without a feisty parent advocating for them?
When it came time for my own kids to get into these programs in elementary school I refused to have them tested, the unfairness of the whole system and the way I saw privileged parents around me gaming the system truly makes my blood boil. I do have some doubts about the wisdom of this decision-sometimes you just have to play the game-but they are all doing fine, though there were a few bumps along the way. My oldest graduated last year with an IB diploma, my middle is set to graduate at the end of the year, also with an IB diploma (one of her teachers recently told her she wished she could use her as an example of a “regular” kid being able to do the IB program. I think she meant it as a compliment and yet…). My youngest just started high school and is going to have the easiest time because when she started kindergarten the school did away with the “smart kids” class and integrated everyone. Students just swapped around for separate math classes based on ability.
I believe our high school has integrated both the IB and honors classes in the last year or so. There are for sure complaints about having to put up with kids who don’t care, but overall am so glad to see things going in this direction.
"My youngest just started high school and is going to have the easiest time because when she started kindergarten the school did away with the “smart kids” class and integrated everyone. Students just swapped around for separate math classes based on ability."
So: tracking?
(I have this same instinct, to dismiss tracking in math as somehow different than in other subjects, but when I interrogate that instinct I'm not sure it's true. I would love to hear from someone who can speak to this.)
I happen to be reading a book about math at the moment and one of the chapters is about the downsides of tracking in math. It's called What's Math Got to Do with It, by Jo Boaler.
Just FYI, Jo Boaler tends to make a LOT of claims that are not backed by peer-reviewed research. Many, many disagree with her approach. The Lucy Calkins of Math?
Absolutely tracking, and it's still problematic. But less so? At least, in my very limited experience, it seems better now than how it was being done before. I do know of kids who have been gotten stuck early and were never able to get off the path they were placed on. From talking to other parents, the school district seems absolutely unmovable in regards to math once a kid is tracked. I too would like to hear from someone who could speak to math in particular. When I was a junior in high school I had a teacher with whom math finally made sense and since then have wondered if it wasn't so much me being bad at math as much as it was the way math was being taught to me.
One issue I don’t see addressed in the tracking conversation is age-level grouping. If we get rid of aptitude-based tracking, we are still left with another kind of tracking in our schools: everyone sitting in a ninth grade English class is there simply because they’re all born in the same year. Shouldn’t we challenge that too?
We don’t do that in other learning scenarios: imagine putting absolute beginners in the same swimming class as Olympic hopefuls, just because they are all 15 years old.
I think the argument for classes by age is the social-emotional learning aspect of school, and benefits of being with your age-level peers. My 7yo may have the reading level of a 9yo, but he is absolutely not socially or emotionally ready to be in 4th grade, even if I think he’s “mature” for his age. I imagine this is only exacerbated once puberty sets in.
But, Montessori schools put kids in multi-age classrooms that span three grades (ages 3-6, 6-9, 9-12) and they make it work. As I argued in another comment, a big factor in it working is smaller class sizes that facilitate individualized attention, in my opinion.
The school on the island is very small and operates in two classrooms: one is K-2, and the other is 3-5. Each classroom has one teacher and an aide, and they can make that sort of learning work *because of how small the class size is.* From what parents have told me, it's really useful to have so many different emotional levels in such an intimate environment — the 5th graders are tasked with a lot of leadership, and there's a lot of pairing/mentoring with younger kids, too.
I mean, yes, a lot of things work when you’re an expensive, selective private school that intentionally keeps class sizes small. I don’t really know what lessons can be extrapolated from that beyond “smaller class sizes and money in education are good.”
I can't wait to read this book and all the comments.
I can only speak to my experience as parent of elementary schoolers in the most diverse school in a diverse city - and our school has both extreme racial and socioeconomic diversity. Our school and district does not track, and I have been amazed by the way they have attempted to support my children who test several grades above his grade level. In some ways I think it is wonderful that he is in the same classroom and he is able to support his classmates and I used to be a big supporter of tracking.
Post-pandemic, however, I am less sure about detracking. My kids are bored, but much more importantly, learning loss is profound for so many students. It's asking so much of teachers to accommodate so many levels, and at the same time for students that are struggling, does it really help them to be in a class with kids that they will never be able to keep up with? How must that make them feel? Furthermore, as middle school approaches, as our district is a lottery district, families are already splitting (much more along socio-economic lines than racial lines) to pursue more challenging paths for the advanced students, and the kids furthest from opportunity end up at the schools with the fewest resources. I really don't know what the solution is, but my biggest takeaway is the structural issues trump everything; it's so much bigger than schools, and I am skeptical that schools can be the thing that makes the world more equitable.
Yeah, it's hard not to have a takeaway of "these are all great ideas for places with resources." Meanwhile in Ohio, public schools are being drained of all their resources in favor of a private/charter/parochial system that only benefits kids who already have resources and it feels like we have no way out.
I was tracked as a kid, also in G&T. It was complicated and I was grateful to be in classes where it was okay to be smart. This was suburban CT in late 80s, early 90s.
Fast forward to being a parent in Metrowest Boston with 2 boys on an IEP and one daughter who is brilliant but bored at school and does the bare minimum and gets good grades.
I am surprised that the gender differences in tracking and achievement have not been addressed. There is some good scholarship on this. My boys aggressively min-max their characters...they test at the top and bottom of their neuropsych evals. I don't look at their standardized testing because I think that stuff is pretty bunk. No school has ever known what to do with them.
Teachers look at my oldest who has a 140 IQ but can literally barely hold a pencil to write, and judge him on his written work. The end. He has felt dumb for his entire school career and it has had SERIOUS practically hospitalization level mental health consequences. This kid is going to join the Navy next year and become a welder. Judging him on written work he can't produce is just such a disservice to kids like him.
Same with my middle boy...didn't get his autism diagnosis till 14 because he is smart enough to get by in school. Now that he has it...they STILL don't know what to do with him because again...brilliant...but processing speed of a sloth.
I guess I am saying that I AM that parent with the kids on the IEPs. These conversations all seem to have my kids as an afterthought.
I agree with the other posters in that it just sounds like we de-track into other tracks. Public schooling is just really complex. There probably isn't one right answer and a lot of the answers seem to pit one kid's need against another kid.
I also think that the emphasis on de-centralizing individual experiences is pretty unhelpful. The brains of the kids going through the public education process literally don't have the neurons to decentralize their experiences. It is okay to say this is what my experience was. You can only talk of your own anyway.
Currently: my own first-grader has a kid in her class who is moving to second grade on Monday. She is sad her friend is leaving but is also new to this possibility of skipping a grade because you are smart enough. SO she has spent the weekend teaching her pre-K sister everything she knows so that younger sister can skip right to Kindergarten. I'm going to ride the high of my kids practicing their handwriting instead of begging for screen time before I tell them that their plan, though adorable, is futile.
"[Little sister] is learning so much!!! I'm teaching her diagraphs, which she keeps forgetting so we will have to review them another day." -Big Sister
Little sister just got an F+ in writing her numbers. 🥹
In the Netherlands we select children at the age of 11-12 into tracks that are then largely offered by different schools based on whether they are more practical or theoretically. Sometimes a school will offer both practical and theoretical once, but then the practical and theoretical tracks are often offered in separate buildings.
The decision which track a student will go to is based on an advice given by their teacher the last year of elementary school. That advice in its turn is based on a bunch of standardized test they took throughout their school years, but also for a large part on the feelings the teacher has for the student. As you can imagine, study after study shows that a lot of biases are present in the process, just like the ones mentioned in the interview. There is one last standardized tests that corrects for that to make sure kids are not placed "too low", but this year is the first year that placements will actually be corrected based on that.
All in all 11 or 12 is way too young to select a track for students, given how much kids that age are still developing. More and more that view is also finding political support and I hope that the proposal to postpone our selection moment by two years will make it into law soon.
One moment from high school I think about frequently. I was generally in honors classes in my large and diverse suburban high school. Yet, I was the kid who was sneaking by with the bare minimum work, and didn't cause trouble. I was happy to just be in classes with my friends! And from my observations, the better teachers taught honors classes, the work was more interesting and way less time was spent on behavior management.
I remember sitting in art class (which was an elective, not tracked, so they had a really different mix of kids in them.) and the announcements came on. The announcements listed the same 5-10 students winning multiple awards over the weekend for sports, academics, music, etc. A girl sitting next to me scoffed, "geez, give someone else a chance!" and I remember being SO SHOCKED by her opinion that only certain kids "had the chance" to do whatever. To my knowledge every single team and activity was desperate for more participation. I may have even engaged her more about this, I don't remember.
This comment, that pointed out a basic truth about my high school: a small percentage of high-acieving students had the privilege to participate in extra curricular activities AND then were publicly celebrated and awarded for doing so. This was widely known, but what I didn't realize at the time is that sports, music, etc. were not equal-opportunity options for all students. For some students, extra-curriculars were lame. But I think a lot of students had to watch younger siblings and have jobs outside of high school. Or they at least needed cars or friends with cars or parents to shuttle them around town to various events and practices. I didn't realize this barrier to entry until I was an adult.... Is the path to "just join!" actually open or is it full of obstacles I couldn't imagine?
There is no "just join" if there are any logistical obstacles. As soon as a parent has to get involved, kids whose parents are exhausted, busy, uninterested, or poor will be at a disadvantage.
I think an essential question is does detracking within a school increase tracking between schools. By this I mean that parents with resources (money, human capital) opt out of the detracked public school and send their children to either private or charter schools that continue to track students. This seems likely to exacerbate racial and class inequality despite the best intentions of educators.
That's an interesting question, although I'm not sure that we should continually bow to the preferences of parents who threaten or ultimately act on leaving a school trying to make a system more fair. In all of the schools I studied, however, this wasn't an issue because they kept the top classes and parents were happy to continue to have access to them for free versus the hassle of moving or paying for a private education. Although the sample size is admittedly very small, when I followed up with these schools, they've been experiencing an increase in enrollment at a time when public school enrollment as a whole has been decreasing.
This is the disaster occurring in Cleveland! We've always had a major issue with wealthy families sending kids to private schools to avoid the more integrated public schools. But recently, Shaker Heights (one of the only public schools that managed to remain about 50% Black/50% white over the past 50 years) detracked and parents of Black kids in honors classes are moving their kids elsewhere so they can continue to be tracked. There is a LOT of concern about the potential harm of detracking in this community.
I’m so glad to see this topic in this space. I am a teacher, curriculum designer, and former beneficiary of things like G&T programming and Honors/AP classes. I would never go back to tracking.*
The benefits of differentiated instruction, inclusion and co-teaching environments, and curriculum done with the tenets of Universal Design in mind have so many benefits — for me as a teacher and for students — from improved social skills to better behavior to more engagement. (There’s also an enormous amount of data on how teacher expectations shape student outcomes, so even if I didn’t have those positive experiences I still wouldn’t consider tracking — which is a way of conveying expectations ahead of time about who can succeed in a given class environment — to be ethically tenable, and would be motivated to explore different solutions.)
The way my colleagues and I think about Universal Design is like this: you make a buffet. In English, this means you pick a topic or a book, with many ways in: reading, watching videos, listening to audio, etc. You set up many ways to show your thinking: art, raps, presentations. Students choose what they need. (They’re usually very good at this.) Highly-skilled kids may still prefer learning with audio materials; struggling students may prefer the structure of a presentation to art; but everyone gets to experience and express themselves in ways that are rigorous and culturally responsive. It’s far preferable than saying to one batch of kids, “You are all getting burgers,” and to another, “You are all getting sushi.” Either way you’re likely not serving something that everyone likes, wants or needs. Offering “voice and choice” in every classroom makes it more likely that you will.
I would imagine that this way of approaching differentiation is explored in the book and something many teachers are already familiar with. But it’s something I think the general public should know more about as well. If you “take something away,” it’s always better to offer a clear and positive vision of what can replace it. This is something that’s already happening across K-12, and while nothing in K-12 is perfect, I think “the buffet” still works very well, for more people, than the alternatives.
*eta: I think we can still offer access to course types like AP (which can help all students better afford college) while still engaging in these best practices, and offering these opportunities to the majority of students vs a minority. But there’s nuance here and I’m open to other POVs on this as well, since I may share some of the same positive biases toward AP specifically as the folks above.
I’m really conflicted about this. My kids attended a Catholic elementary school and then a suburban public high school with a reputation for good academics. The detracking movement was just getting going and it was the height of the “college for all” fad. The high school made the decision to allow anybody to enroll in honors classes, which made sense, but didn’t materially change the demographics in the honors/AP track. The counselors and teachers genuinely cared and worked hard to get kids with potential to try honors, but after a couple of years of that the new administration tried to just get rid of the honors track altogether. Hoooo boy…you want to see ugliness? Try taking advanced classes away from parents who are doctors, attorneys, and academics. I’m surprised that guy isn’t buried under the goalposts on the football field.
If schools want to offer rigorous academics and make those classes the norm, then I’m fine with detracking, but the idea that you take away things like 8th grade algebra or HS calculus in order to reduce inequity is a terrible idea. Kids whose parents don’t have clout or resources will suffer, where wealthy parents will just hire tutors or put their kids in private school so that they can have advanced academics.
Yes, taking away the top track makes zero sense to me!
I think this is my hang up with detracking as it gets discussed around me. It always comes down to the idea of cutting the enrichment rather than expanding the enrichment which to me defeats the purpose. We need to offer that high level to as many students as possible because they can rather than just decide "on level" types of curriculum are the best. If we did smaller classes and more intervention earlier on we could feasibly do this too.
That's really interesting to me. Taking away the top level isn't something I hear discussed in my research. We did have many conversations at my high school about limiting the number of AP classes a kid could take because of all the stress and burnout, but I think that's a different conversation. If you could point me in the direction of some districts who seem to be getting it backward, I'd love to take a look!
I don't know how much of it is scare mongering in the Deep South, but like Louisiana already thinks teachers are more or less the enemy indoctrinating children. I've sat in curriculum meetings where the idea of teaching algebra I to 8th graders is seen as a negative because not all students are ready. To me, ensuring more students are ready for algebra I is a better goal than delaying it.
The Catholic school my kids went to offered algebra in 8th grade and the challenge the principal had was telling about half of the parents that their kid wasn’t ready for algebra, and if they pushed, it would end in tears. He was a huge proponent of Jean Piaget’s theory of development, and his argument was that a lot of 12 year olds just aren’t developmentally ready for the abstract nature of algebra, and pushing them into it early will make them hate math.
As a kid who always did well at math and was tracked into early algebra where I hit a complete wall—I had NO idea what was going on, and I avoided math like the plague after that until college, when I took basic algebra and did pretty well….it wasn’t my sweet spot, but I learned it…his argument resonated with me.
Take a look at Seattle Public Schools. About 5 years ago they proposed eliminating the Highly Capable program and there was a big backlash so I don’t know if they ended up going forward with that idea. They also proposed “humanizing” math by introducing lessons about math creating systems of oppression or something.
I deeply appreciate that Dr. Thornton is a former classroom teacher (you're never really a former classroom teacher). Too many people making decisions about education have never had to sit across from a parent to deliver news that will disappoint their dreams for their child or navigated the exhaustion of a school year.
Like you, AHP, I have painfully mixed feelings about detracking. My once a week Gifted class was a social haven where I wasn't bullied and I didn't have to worry about being bored. I could just be me. I always resented being asked to be a mini-teacher's assistant. My classmates hated it, too. It occurs to me, however, that none of that is about academics. It's all about culture and community. It is possible to build a different world.
As a 1st /2nd grade teacher at a VERY Fancy Pants Independent School in Seattle (if you live in Seattle & have kids you know which one I'm talking about), my colleagues and I were tasked with creating individualized curriculum for each of our students. We designed lessons as a team of six. It was a lot of work but it wasn't impossible. What I loved about that approach was that no one was "behind" or "ahead". It was okay to nail multiplication and need more support with subtraction. It was okay to have a day where you showed up as your inner six year old even though you were almost eight. Part of what made that possible is that we focused on competencies rather than learning objectives. We had detailed rubrics. We didn't use textbooks. It was an inquiry based approach. (Racism still existed in the school- it just became behavior based. I lasted one year.)
I think detracking is much more possible if you don't try to shove it into the existing learning model. As a skills-based hiring champion now, I want schools to rethink how education happens. The workplace isn't tracked. And there are no quizzes or final exams. If we start the competency conversation from the beginning, this all gets easier.
I disagree that the workplace isn't tracked.... People are tracked for promotions, for management, for funding for research etc.
Good point. I've been in the education / nonprofit space & I've spent the last four years in a series of gap jobs while I look for my next career move. So I guess I'm fully off track? I have never participated in that realm.
The WORST example of this is actually tied to K - 12 tracking. The big branded consulting companies recruit directly from Ivy League schools (which are only accessible to kids who have hit all the right marks on the track). Ancillary consulting companies & businesses then seek people with "Big Four consulting experience". I'm just wondering how I was supposed to know any of this when I was 10.
You were not supposed to know this when you were 10 but most likely some of the adults around you did. I grew up very, very poor and went to the worst high school in our city. Our school was not diverse (our city was 94% white at the time) but we were known as the 'white trash' school. Most people came from single parent households, incarcerated parents, parents with serious drug and alcohol issues etc. I clearly remember being laughed at by other schools at a basketball tournament because we were the only school who could not afford to stay at a hotel ( we literally slept on the floor of a math classroom and used the change rooms to shower) and who had packed 3 days' worth of food because we could not afford to eat out. I was labelled 'bright' though and put in enriched/gifted classes and sent to conferences (sponsored by donors) where my eyes were opened to so much that I otherwise never would have seen/known. Adults at my school knew that formal higher education was my way out and they were right. I now work for one of these consulting houses that you refer to. As the parent of a college freshman and a sophomore high schooler, my issue isn't so much with tracking in and of itself but the 'ranking' of the tracking i.e. you are better if you are in the college track than the trades track. No everyone should go/needs to go to college but kids are made to feel less than if they do not want to go. Many of my high school peers were "tracked "for trades and are now plumbers/electricians etc. and are productive members of society... no more, no less than I am. I think the bigger issue is that we have to get away from college being the gold standard for all.
No one around me knew any of this. I grew up in a family of educators, factory workers, & urban policy wonks. I attended a small blue collar high school in a fading industrial community where graduating from high school was still an achievement & getting into Penn State Main Campus was a big deal. They introduced AP classes almost a decade after I graduated. There is so much tacit knowledge that wasn't available but is now thanks to the internet.
I have been working to eliminate the perceived "need" for college degrees for years now, helping employers set up apprenticeships in non-trade sectors, championing competency based job analysis, and even just asking questions like "What useful information does a person's college degree give you?". That alone blows people's minds. They'll say things like "Well, it's evidence that they can complete something." And then I ask "Are there other ways to get that information?" What a college degree requirement actually signals is culture & it points toward answering "Will this person fit in here?"
yes!! Finishing a trade school shows you that someone can 'complete something' Seeing something that someone built shows you that someone can 'complete something' Watching someone train for a marathon and then do one shows you that someone can 'complete something'!! We need to change the conversation
My dad graduated from high school in 1950 and had a long career as a photojournalist. He worked up to chief of photography at the Oregonian before quitting to freelance for National Geographic, People, Sunset, NY Times, etc., all without a college degree. My 3 sisters and I all went to four year colleges (3 private and one public), and have between us three masters and a PhD.
Our kids went to a) Very Fancy Art College, b) local private college, c) community college, d) off-and-on at state universities until eventually a degree e) culinary institute after dropping out of a four year program, and my teen is planning to do 2 years at a community college before going to the local state university to finish a bachelors. I don't think a four year degree is expected in quite the same way anymore? The older kids are all doing fine; three own homes and all are employed. When I graduated in '87 and headed off to a fancy New England private school, I would have been horrified at any of the above options besides A and B. But my niece the art school grad is the only one with insane debt in her 30s, working a job that has very little to do with her degree. (And my nephew the private school grad majored in accounting because he's just that guy.)
Sounds to me though like most started with the idea of a 4 year degree and then veered from there? Wouldn't have it been nice if the one who ended up doing culinary school did it from the get go and potentially saved themselves the cost of a 4 year college? I was just astounded last year when my daughter was graduating high school how going to college was the best way and everything else was less. Even the 2 hour post secondary meeting at school was 1 hour and 45 minutes spent on 4 year college, 10 minutes on community college and 5 minutes on trades. The message was clear to all what the 'best' avenue was...
I'm so conflicted about this. On the one hand, a college education is still the surest path to the middle class in this country and gives a person many more option than learning a single trade. On the other, that's an exceptionally dumb way to run an economy. What I find troubling, however, is that parental education level continues to be one of the largest factors in students' educational levels and schools essentially become social reproduction factories. I think it would be ideal if we could find a way to divorce these statistics so that all students were making a free choice and that everyone was assured of having their needs met regardless of the career path they chose.
Parental education & zip code. Because it's also about income. The K-12 system 100% replicates privilege because of the way we assign and fund schools.
I deeply question the conventional wisdom around the power of college degrees because it turns out that it isn't just a college degree. If you go to a community college, if you go to an online school, if you go to a for-profit school, if you go to a diploma mill school- any of those factors & the weight / access of a college degree fades. Tressie McMillan Cottom's "Lower Education" unpacks this brilliantly.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you said 'this country' So many European countries track and have a wonderful middle class that is not all college educated citizens. Germany is a great example of this. I guess it is a bit of a 'chicken and egg' situation... do you try and change the attitude that college in the be all end all first and then kids can make decisions about their future based on interest and skill/aptitude or do you try and send everyone to college just to realize that this leads to people realizing that college may not have been the best choice for them?
I'm also not sure we can look to Europe here! Tracking in Europe tends to also largely be based on students' demographic factors, including parents' educational levels. I also saw a study a few years ago showing that adults who were in different tracks in European schools tended to have statistically different health outcomes. I'd like to see a system where students are truly making a free choice with negative impacts.
There are so many trades that guarantee six-figure salaries after a few years of apprenticeship. Plumbers and electricians are in many cases in better financial situations than physicians at age 35. It's insane to me that our goal is to send every kid to college to get a degree that may not benefit them (sorry sociology) when so many would be better served by a trade.
" My once a week Gifted class was a social haven where I wasn't bullied and I didn't have to worry about being bored. I could just be me. I always resented being asked to be a mini-teacher's assistant. My classmates hated it, too. It occurs to me, however, that none of that is about academics. It's all about culture and community. It is possible to build a different world."
This resonated with me so much. I went to an independent school. I was always tracked into "the highest X class". That's what we called it, as students. No one told us this group of kids was in the hardest math or reading class, but we all figured it out. I have extremely vivid memories of my 2nd grade reading class. It was this beautiful space of learning and creativity. It felt like play rather than work because of the joy all of my fellow students had for reading and learning. It was one space where I wasn't viewed as snobby for being shy and nerdy (can't tell you how many people got to know me later and told me they thought I was a snob). I loved it so much. I can completely see all the ways tracking is problematic, even as I recognize the ways it benefited me personally - in a college admissions type of way but also in that it taught me learning is fun and joyful when you're in an environment where your needs are seen at met. I wonder how schools can create a culture of deep joy and fun in learning?
This is it exactly, Rachel. ALL of schooling should feel the way Gifted / "college prep" classes felt: spaces where curiosity was encouraged, exploration was supported, and where you could just be who you are. That's not an "intelligence" thing. That's a learning environment thing. The obsession with measurement, pathologizing, and industrializing education does not allow for this. Nor does the way we train teachers. Nor does the way we obsess over school test scores.
It seems to me that Dr Thornton basically is talking about the need for a new type of school rather than simple rejiggering of the old sort. Your school in Seattle seems like what she is looking for.
Oh this is interesting! I had no idea what this was called, but experienced it vividly - and not positively - as a kid. (Edit to note: this experience was 1970s through the 80s, for comparative reference to other's experiences.)
Apparently my sister and I were "tracked". Interestingly enough, we ended up in entirely different situations. We were both bright, reading a lot, with parents who could and did take us to museums and libraries, etc. all the time. Even so, my sister was tracked into "Gifted and Talented" as the track was called and I was tracked into "Regular". Note throughout this that I present more with more of my father's South Asian appearance than my sister who presents more with the white appearance of our Nordic mother.
I found most of school unchallenging to the point that I'd daydream, flip through my books and skip homework. I took refuge in the school library in the morning (god bless librarians) and adored my science and art teachers who gave me interesting things to work on. But for the most part, school was where I helped my fellow students understand what the teacher was saying, or how to write a paper, and where I tried to make myself invisible from the mean or bullying students while still visible to the teacher. I got daily reminders that my sister's classes were more interesting and covered subjects in more depth and breadth, that her assignments involved some creativity and less rote memorization, and that her teachers didn't seem burned out, would learn her name and even would speak to my parents about things to keep her engaged.
And then came along Standardized Testing. And suddenly I was yanked out of "Regular" and placed in an "Advanced" English class, a Creative Writing class and introduced to pre-algebra. Overnight school became fun and I went from Bs and Cs to straight As. The difference in how I was taught was SHOCKING and obvious to me, even as a 7th grader.
And then our school district made some significant efforts to integrate a bit better at the high school level. Everyone from my poor-area junior high school, whether white, black or hispanic, regardless of what level classes they were in at the junior high, ended up in "Regular" or "Basic" classes at the rich-white-area high school we were integrated into. I was so very much NOT going back to that situation and fought for a year to get placed back into Advanced classes. I did, even ending up in some classes where there were GT students. Apparently I wrote better and got better grades than they did and one of my English teachers used a A I got on a test to shame the other students into doing better.
I utterly, utterly despised the system. I can't even put into words how much I hated it. It was enough that I gave serious thought to never putting my own children (if I would have had kids; I never did) through public school. Honestly, I feel like I eventually graduated in the upper 20% of my high school despite it and because I actively struggled against it. But I never knew what it was called.
One thing that I think warrants further exploration is the meeting the needs of the actual gifted students. Kids that are two standard deviations ahead of the norm really should be considered special education just like kids two standard deviations below are. Specialized instruction for both groups likely would lead to the best gains. I know that in some states gifted is special education, but it's not everywhere.
As a classroom teacher who admittedly is teaching only AP classes this year, I worry that class size alone makes detracking extremely difficult. It's hard enough to meet varied needs in a more homogenous class than one that in high school could span reading levels from elementary to college ready. Classes of 30 do not lend themselves well to anything but teaching to the middle due to the number of hours required to prep lessons. My students have commented on how much more laid back their honors and AP classes are in terms of behavior and that most people are ready to do the work in those classes in comparison to the non-honors version. I don't know if there is a great solution for engagement, but I'm always willing to explore other options to raise the tide for all boats.
Philosophically I like the idea of detracking, but the practicalities of it at the high school level concern me in terms of making an already difficult job almost impossible. I think it's something we would need to start at an elementary level and move up rather than disband it k-12 all at once. Without smaller classes though I'm not sure it's feasible on a large scale.
A million times yes to the real enemy being large class sizes, from another high-school teacher here. If you want detracking to actually work, cut my class size in half. I can’t give individualized attention to 30+ kids. The bigger and more heterogeneous the class, the more of my energy goes to classroom management and sheer logistics.
I can't differentiate for 35+kids for four block periods a day. I simply don't have the energy. I can do my best and then will feel super guilty that it will never be enough because I'm playing whack a mole with classroom management.
Yes, class size is a huge factor, and every school I studied had to make their class sizes smaller to make detracking feasible. All of the schools also worked closely with their feeder schools to also do some type of detracking that mirrored what was happening at the high school level. Where I can't agree, however, is the idea of making gifted education similar to special education. First, we lack accurate measures of giftedness. When you talk about standard deviations above the norm, the test that is producing those scores is largely rooted in eugenics (I know this sounds super dramatic, but it really is true: https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/time-to-shift-away-from-standardized-testing). We have to have better measures that aren't culturally biased and simply reflect students' existing opportunities before we can rely on them to determine what access students have to resources. I also live in a state where gifted education is treated as a type of special education and students can get a gifted IEP. This system is ripe for manipulation by well-resourced parents. I often think that one solution would be IEPs for everyone and a focus on mastery as someone downthread mentioned, but until we can change our first principles in US education, that would also probably be manipulated by parents who (understandably!) want to get more resources for their kids and have the time and inclination to do it.
I guess my question is what do we do the precocious math students who are working multiple grades ahead? Do we just keep drilling them on middle school math skills or do we allow them to keep growing? I actually very much agree on a mastery based approach because it would benefit all students. Where I struggle is that no one seems to care at all about the kids who are bored in class. I didn't find the help peers who are struggling out or do busy work a satisfactory answer when I was a student, and have seen students aren't satisfied with that today. I teach in a majority minority title 1 school so I'm not in a wealthy area, and our top kids are getting so much less than the private schools near us. We are a non magnet district school so we don't pick out our students. It just sucks to know they are going to be behind when they head off to college compared to the kids in Catholic school nearby.
My brother and I were reminiscing about our grade school educations recently. We grew up in in a middle-class suburban district that was at the time 100% white—this was before fair housing laws. The teachers were a mix of young women and older women who had returned to work after their kids had grown up, so I am guessing they got their teacher’s training roughly when my grandmother did..late 1920’s and early 1930’s. Third grade math was spent teaching multiplication and division. Our teacher was very old, and very “mean,” but she had everybody proficient at the end of the year. I realize now she had differentiated instruction down to a science. She explained multiplication and then she had a variety of activities available for practice—worksheets, manipulative, pictures, flash cards. After she taught, there was a work period where kids picked out an activity and practiced. There was a big chart at the front of the room with everybody’s name on it and when you felt you had memorized a set of multiplication facts well enough to be tested, you walked up to her desk and told her what you wanted to demonstrate. She’d ask “2x2” and you’d give the answer…and she’d go through the “2’s” or whichever set you wanted to show you knew. If you got 100% you got a star in the box on the chart for that set of problems. When your chart was full, you could pick an activity to work on during math practice time.
As more and more kids finished up their multiplication tables, it left a smaller group for her to work with on what they needed to learn. The 1:1 recitation gave her insight into who was having trouble and possibly where that trouble might be. There were incentives to getting through the tables…your chart was full of colorful stars AND once you were finished you could do an activity that was more enjoyable like read or draw or color—or help another kid by drilling them with flash cards.
She was in many ways an awful woman (by the time my brother had her there were a couple of Black kids in the school and he remembers her being really vicious to them) but NOBODY got out of third grade without memorizing multiplication and simple division facts.
How many students do you have who are working multiple grades ahead? Some resources I really like in terms of practicality come from Carol Ann Tomlinson and her work. Here are some free samples of that: https://files.ascd.org/staticfiles/ascd/pdf/siteASCD/publications/books/differentiated-classroom2nd-sample-chapters.pdf
Could those kids be working on math-related projects related to their school or community? I was an English teacher, but all of my students had a year-long project they worked on (mostly) independently in addition to our units, so when students wrapped up work or mastered a concept, they had time to work on these projects. I'd love to talk with you more about organizing these projects if you're interested!
Right now my school pushes these kids (about 25 seniors and 20 juniors) into dual enrollment classes at the local college. Which basically feels like we wash our hands of having to meet their needs. I think this actually causes accessibility issues in terms of IEP, 504, and ELL students because those opportunities aren't provided to those students due to colleges dealing with disability differently and requiring act/sat scores at levels commensurate with admission standards.
I just really think we should be doing better for kids in the building and not offloading them to a system that isn't meant for dealing with 15 year olds.
I'm a huge fan of Tomlinson, and wish administrators would actually embrace her work in a practical way on a whole school level. Embrace the time required to prep, don't limit copies for teachers, and accept that growth may not always be linear for all kids, but will come if we meet their needs.
State standards of course are a separate but not unrelated nightmare. If we meet kids where they are, and view things as big picture not just a calendar school year things would be a lot better.
I'm thinking too about how I was identified as gifted probably largely because I started reading at age 3 and never stopped. BUT...I didn't have a TV, had five people at home who both read to me and modeled reading for pleasure, and had ready access to books at home and in the public library as well as at school. Am I gifted, or am I just normally intelligent and given special support and incentive? (In the 70s and 80s if you didn't have a TV, books were pretty much your only other option for stories.)
I would be really interested to know more details about the new system at Johnson HS -- because from this brief discussion, it sounds like they eliminated tracking and replaced it with...different tracking. So they have life-skills classes, as they should, but then it sounds very much to me like they've pulled students with lesser but still significant special needs into a "small track that doesn’t include IB for students who don’t need the life skills program but don’t feel prepared for the IB program." (What does "don't feel prepared" mean? Does the student make that determination? The teachers? The parents? Are they "unprepared" -- i.e. have insufficient preparation, maybe because they entered the district later and didn't participate in pre-IB, in which case maybe prepare them?? -- or does the school consider them "unable" to be successful? Those are really different.)
So sure, they "don't have tracking" anymore, but they also don't have inclusion. What percentage of IEP students are "untracked" vs. placed in the "small track"?
(I don't have a better solution, to be clear; I taught for ten years and then bailed like more and more teachers are doing. But reading an article where the one example of detracking *is still tracking* makes me fairly skeptical.)
This gestures to something that I and other parents I talk to have had trouble with in these conversations, which is that de-tracking always seems to mean only one thing and that thing is taking programs away from more advanced kids. If you want to say "fine, just one class and we teach to the median student--no IEPs, no additional support for kids that fall behind" that would be detracking right? It would also be a return to what I think of as a mid-century system that was really quite bad. But no one ever proposes that, the proposal is always that kids that need extra support get all the extra support we can muster, the median students get a curriculum that is designed with them in mind, and the kids that are ahead get... nothing. (I also have a lot more to say about the race and class dynamics of this because my experience as a parent in a reasonably diverse New York City school that recently eliminated a G&T program is that it is not necessarily the wealthier or whiter parents that are pushing for more testing, tracking, homework and what not, especially in lower grades.)
This touches on the source of my conflicted feelings about de-tracking - I hear friends say things like “giftedness isn’t real, it is just the way wealthy parents hoard educational resources” and like, there is SO much truth to the argument that G&T programs operate that way in practice, but at the same time: gifted children do exist and have specific needs as a result. It always feels weird to talk about this because people have the impression (maybe partly because the word “gifted” itself suggests that someone is being given advantages) that gifted kids are already fortunate and anything we do for them is just giving more to those who have more already…but as a kid who was “diagnosed” as “profoundly gifted” as a kid, I think it’s better to think of it as a kind of neurodivergence that requires particular accommodations (and also, so many of us are what gets called “2E”, too).
There was no world in which I was ever going to have a “normal” school experience…in NC I was absolutely being tracked and would’ve have gone to the “gifted” school starting in 3rd grade if we hadn’t moved away. In MN, they didn’t do that kind of tracking, but once they got over their prejudice about southern accents, they created a special sort of IEP for me that let me bounce around to different grade levels and specific teachers for independent study until I was old enough to do PSEO (taking college classes while in HS). So I’ve experienced both the tracked and “untracked but provided with opportunities that met my needs” versions of education that were on offer in the late 80’s-2001
My social/educational justice commitments put me on the side of wanting less tracking IF the tracking of simply reinforcing existing wealth and racial disparities, which does seem to be true of most tracking…but I worry a LOT about the kids who needs won’t get met, especially the “gifted” who so many assume don’t have needs. I can say with confidence (as a person who has lived with the kind of existential depression that is typical amongst “gifted” kids) that if I hadn’t gotten the kinds of “accommodations” I got throughout school as a “gifted” kid, I quite likely wouldn’t be alive today.
You have expressed what I struggled to. It's something I see in a handful of high school students every year. The quiet desperation of kids who aren't getting what they need because it's more. I think about 2E kids a lot in this discussion. Neurodivergence is a really good way to think about it because it is a neurodivergence. I know there are large issues with classifying gifted, but some kids are.
This. My kid and I are both '2E' and his experiences in school are just SO much better/easier because he was diagnosed young (don't get me started on how many neurodivergent girls are missed) AND because we're able to afford a really good private school that is able to challenge him in the areas he excels at and push him in the areas he's behind in (mild dyscalulia). While he complains about school he's not experiencing being bullied for being smart, having teachers get annoyed at him for asking too many questions/reading too far ahead or being made into a mini teacher (you understand this, go tutor your peers) which neurodivergent 11 yr old me wasn't interested in or prepared to do from a social skills angle!
OMG, neurodivergent kids are so NOT prepared to teach other kids! We don't have the social skills, and if we're gifted, we don't even understand what the other kids struggle with. I sure didn't. The triviality thresholds are just too far apart.
This conversation severely needs a lot more neurodivergent input.
I think part of my resistance as a teacher as I definitely loathed that as a kid, and your peers often DO NOT WANT help from someone who might make them feel lesser due to social skills or just insecurity. As an introverted, adhd (diagnosed as an adult), formerly gifted kid and now AP teacher I'm really careful about what I do in groups because nurturing fragile peer relations is really important for a happy classroom.
My competitive private high school that I attended really drove home the idea of hard work being important so effort, and doing school right were definitely commended along with achievement. There was a sense of the question is not "will you meet the standards, but how what will we do to get you there?" It was so incredible to be in small, highly focused classes with other kids who participated and did the work outside of class because being a smart kid was cool. There was no belief that being smart was simply innate, though we were a privileged bunch for sure, but there was a lot of "you are being give lm opportunities, so take advantage of them!"
I have major gender concerns about girls being made to be peer helpers in classrooms due to being more compliant and docile too (that I just realized). Those were some of the most miserable elementary experiences for me. I still remember not getting my week with the double desk alone (not having a partner) that I was so thrilled about because I was a good example. Formerly selectively mute me loved being alone as a kid with my books or imagination.
Giftedness is in fact a kind of neurodivergence that requires particular accommodations.
I'm 3E (giftedness, ADHD, autism), and I have very much experienced the mental illness-inducing boredom you're describing, but the public school system had always been like, "F*** you, you don't even exist, kid."
When I was 25 and struggling in college, I had mass murder ideation for a few weeks, which only stopped when an actual mass murder happened in my city. Academic neglect is serious.
I am painfully aware that I'm part of a tiny minority. The suggested piecemeal solutions for people like me feel half-assed: I don't learn well on my own, so being banished to the library wouldn't have worked; anything involving parents wouldn't have worked either, because my parents really couldn't be bothered, even though they were not struggling financially.
I'm sorry, I just don't have solutions. This wound has only just started healing. I'm 43 years old.
You and I are the same age, and I'm so sorry you experienced that. The part about solutions for the kids that need more feeling halfassed is really valid because so many solutions are you can take an online course in the library or you can help peers.
We haven't even touched on the teachers who actively resent exceptionally capable kids because they don't fit the mold, and can be more challenging in the classroom. I've seen too many people in my field want to take gifted kids down a few pegs because "they aren't as smart as they think they are," but the flip side is the kid is often significantly smarter than the adult claiming this. Teachers mostly hate being challenged, but there are times they should be!
That is so true, what you say about teachers who resent exceptionally capable kids that don't fit the mold.
After I worked hard on my mother for her to push the school to let me skip a grade, my 4th grade teacher despised me and let the class girlboss bully me every single day, smirking at the bully's antics. I felt sick in my stomach every day before going to school. I remember developing depression during that exact year, what with my parents not doing anything about it on top of everything else.
I share this concern, but I think it's really important to differentiate between students who are simply diligent (something our system really values) or who appear advanced because of the lack of rigor in gen ed classes, and students who are academically advanced to the point where it's essentially a special need. This is a *really small* percentage of kids.
I only taught at one middle school where I really felt like all students' needs were being met. This school had the vast majority of students in the "regular" English and math classes, which were sufficiently rigorous that kids were well prepared to go into AP classes in high school (this was, not surprisingly, a well resourced school in a well resourced town). There was one small section of advanced English, and when I say advanced -- I teach college now, and I use some of the same lessons and projects with my first- and second-year college students as I did with my eighth graders, and they're not always as successful as my junior high kids were. This was about 15 kids in each class of 200+. In math, some kids were a grade or two ahead, and kids who were advanced beyond that self-studied in the library or got bussed to the high school.
The mainstream classes were genuinely challenging, so kids whose test scores were in the bottom 20% or so (of our school, which put them just below the median nationally) got extra support in the form of an extra class period of English and/or math *every single day*, in lieu of an elective class. These classes had five or six kids in them and ran parallel to the gen ed class. They covered the same topic that the gen ed class covered that day, but with only six kids in the class, students could ask lots of questions, the teacher could find and fill in any gaps in their previous knowledge, and they could get extra practice with the material. Most kids were only in these parallel support classes for a term or two, but they were pretty fluid, so students would move in and out of them as needed. The goal, always, was to bring kids "up to speed" in the regular class, and it *worked*. Many students who transferred into our district ended up in these classes, at least for a while.
Science and social studies were the same for all of the students (except some life skills kids); some of those classes were co-taught. Same with electives. It worked exceptionally well. Students got what they needed. It was also incredibly expensive, because it turns out that good education costs a lot of money.
This differentiation between dilligent and gifted in a "special needs" capacity is so, so important — it reminds me of the conversation a few months ago with Ana Homayoun re: "student success," and how much of our current understanding of a very good student (as in, organized and diligent) is mapped onto this understanding of "gifted" (and how it isn't great for anyone involved)
https://annehelen.substack.com/p/a-different-way-to-think-about-student
Your comment resonates with me. In all schooling prior to high school, I was diligent (but not challenged intellectually—but I didn’t know that at the time), and that diligence really did carry so much weight.
Too much weight, perhaps, since later on that was absolutely not enough.
Such a good point. Diligence, reasonable intelligence, and the ability to "do school" are great tools for academic success, but do not equal "giftedness." And while I love the model you describe, I feel like it would only be that successful in the community you describe. I'm currently at a k-5 school that is highly impacted by poverty and trauma, and while the kids of course have the intellectual ability to do what you're talking about, there are so many behaviors and unmet needs getting in the way that instead they are getting further and further behind. My school has a dual language immersion program, so one class per grade level is made up of Spanish speaking students whose parents enrolled them in that. Just the simple act of having parents who were able to navigate the system to that extent means that these classes are essentially our "high level" classes. And although I'm glad for them that they get non-chaotic classrooms, I also know that the rest of our school would benefit from having more kids who know how to "do school" in their classes.
I'm so sorry that's been your experience! Historically, tracking began in the late 19th century with an influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Educational bureaucrats considered them white enough to go to white high schools but not white enough to be in the college prep classes. All of the examples in the book and the schools with which I continue to work aren't working on taking things away from more advanced kids. One example is in Charlottesville, Virginia where they expanded enrichment classes in elementary school so that all kids took them like they take music, art, PE, etc. The enrichment teachers then also were freed up to work with the general ed teachers to plan enrichment opportunities for kids in the general ed classroom who were already doing work "above" grade-level. This model is becoming more ubiquitous and is also sort of mirrored at the high school level by the schools in my book that opened up levels rather than taking away the top one.
👆🏻I am going to have to mull this article over before I give a full response but I am in year 27 in the classroom and I am very cynical when someone leaves the classroom after a few trans pops back up with a solution that “teachers just have to do this.” Please. There is no “just” and rarely is there infrastructure or fortitude to actually follow through on these reforms. So they are a momentary flash in the pan that gets press but rarely is still in place 5-10 years later.
I hope you will think about it more! I also hope my writing accurately reflects my belief that student sorting isn't about something only teachers have to do but rather a holistic process that involves students, communities, and school leaders. In fact, my book focuses specifically on school leaders and their work as does my overall research and teaching. The school highlighted in the interview above has been doing this work for over 20 years, so I don't think it's a flash in the pan by any means. I left working in a high school for a research career because I saw how successful our program was for our students and wanted to figure out why and how other schools could potentially replicate this success. I would have stayed if I had felt like I could have that kind of impact on the larger system while still teaching high schoolers as opposed to adults.
I definitely will think about it more and try to give a more nuanced response later today. I can only speak to my experience and let me tell you, the only way I have survived in education as long as I have is through pure grit (and a lack of other options in my community). Telling new teachers that they have to have five differentiated lessons in each class is not only unrealistic, it’s downright cruel. The path of least resistance is to make one that everyone can do (dumb down the curriculum). I can see how this COULD work in a functional district but I have a lot of anecdotal information from teachers across the country that shows most are dysfunctional. So I feel it becomes an ideal versus real world discussion and I reside firmly in the real world.
In my district we have gone away from tracking in a traditional way but have gone to a voluntary school within a school that students have to apply to and then teachers pick who gets to participate. It has created the most sickening form of elitism and privilege. That would make an interesting case study of how an attempt to provide supports for non college bound students can go sideways and turn into the opposite of what it was billed as.
I wish I could have gone into more detail about this in the interview! They absolutely do have inclusion. Most kids with IEPs are in the pre-IB program as are most students at the high school. The pre-IB classes are largely co-taught between general and special education teachers. In terms of numbers, there are ~20 kids out of the school of 2000 in life skills and another 20 or so in the non-IB program. The decisions are made by the families, school people, and student together, usually after the students has tried pre-IB. There are also more examples of other schools in the book (not to shill, just nodding to space constraints).
I really think that we need to get away from thinking that IB is the be all, end all and to promote all 'tracks' college/community college/trades as being equally as valuable and not 'less than'. My kids were/are at an IB integrated high school where they get to select full IB for grades 11 and 12. Both kids have decided against IB in those grades. Teachers/parents were telling me that I should push my kids into the IB because of its "prestige". Choosing not to go IB has made 0 difference to my daughter's college acceptances and 0 difference to her academic success in her freshman year.
The thing is though that for kids without protective factors such parental education, racial privilege, class privilege, etc., the tracks currently aren't equally valuable. Coming from a poorly-resourced, rural high school to UVA, I really struggled, and I think I would have struggled even more without the handful of AP classes my school offered. I also doubt I would have gotten into UVA without taking them. As an educator, I think I am constantly struggling between the world as it is and the world as I would like it to be.
I felt the same when I got to university. It was very clear that my very "low class" school did not prepare me for the rigours of University..... and I am not sure that this would have been any different though had my school been untracked. I still think that a huge part of the answer is getting away from valuing some tracks more than others. I am also 100% aware that this is so much easier said than done.
This is helpful, thank you!
I think co-teaching is a huge help when it's set up well. I remain curious about the kids in the small track -- could they be successful in pre-IB with more support? If not, why not? Does it tend to be kids with behavioral issues? Even if most of the students with IEPs are in pre-IB, what percentage of kids in this small track have IEPs? And what are the offerings like for those students?
It's not behavior-based but more student and parent initiated after trying the pre-IB program. Those students are still in the same classroom as the IB class. They just don't take the IB test. They only take the state test required for graduation. This group is so small, the school couldn't report out IEP status because it would be too easy to then identify students.
Ahhh, I missed the part where they're in the same classroom. That makes a big difference, and makes a lot of sense.
So it sounds like tracking is where kids are placed according to where their test scores/grades (even from years before) put them, i.e. you scored well enough on a standardized test in elementary school to be labeled “gifted” and then you’re tracked into higher level classes unless you opt out (this was my experience, though by the time my sister—3 years younger—was at my HS they’d created the IB program, which had more rigorous requirements but was also more encompassing of high performing students who had not been placed in “gifted” classes). So is detracking where there is more individual choice for higher level classes or where the higher level classes are just the regular classes?
My kids’ educational experiences have been split between two schools: a private, college prep Episcopal school and a suburban public school. In the private school, tracking started in seventh grade with math class. It eventually became as stratified in HS as my experience in the 90s was—essentially, you have the same people in every core class for 4 years. I think there is some choice when it comes to AP classes, but non-AP, more “advanced” classes were entirely dependent upon performance and teacher recommendation. When my daughter—now a junior—was in 8th grade, they brought the honors English teacher in to her classroom to talk about the class and how great it was, but then it turned out you could only be in the class if your 8th grade teacher thought you should be in it. She didn’t make whatever the cut was and was disappointed. We moved in the interim and she started at the public school for ninth grade.
The experience here has been wholly different. Here kids choose a pathway, which funnels them into classes related to what they think they may want to do. There are dozens of pathways ranging from things like construction to health to culinary to a kind of pre-law. Those are your elective classes and then for core, kids can choose from whatever is offered—typically regular, honors, or AP if there is one. In addition to that, every kid takes an AP class their freshman and sophomore years. This is to introduce kids who may be unfamiliar with it to AP, and, I think, to help show kids and their parents who may be less inclined, or in a different system less selected, that they have the capability to do well in a class that is rigorous and challenging.
I’ve been really so much more encouraged by the way this school is set up: my daughter is able to choose classes that challenge her and has teachers who recognize her potential and push her to meet it, which wasn’t the case at the private, tracked school. I don’t know if this is an example of de-tracking, but it’s been so refreshing to feel like the tyranny of the labeling a kid through placing them in certain classes has been removed.
So many thoughts about this! In elementary school in the 70s, I was in a very early version of gifted programming and loved it. I was tracked in high school in the 80s. First quarter of junior year there was a scheduling issue and I took "regular" English. While the advanced class was reading Macbeth, the regular class was...studying commas. I looked around at my classmates, and knew that they could also handle Macbeth, and was pissed on their behalf. I have a dear friend who was in these regular classes, and she says she felt dumb because of that.
I'm in year 26 of teaching, and have seen a big push to eliminate barriers to AP or advanced or whatever-you-call-the-high-track classes. My biggest personal experience with detracking is when I was teaching reading workshop at the middle school. For two years I had classes of students who tested 2-4 years below grade level in reading but did not have an identified learning disability and who were not currently in the ELD classes. I liked it. Then I managed to convince someone to let kids who love reading also be in the class, and WOW. The difference in mood, engagement, and even community was huge. I did that for another five years, give or take a pandemic, then when my school decided to go back to only having "low" readers, and putting them in a canned program instead of letting me teach a love of reading, I quit. (Well, I managed to find another job first, because my need to eat overshadows my need to make a point.)
I see the pendulum that EVERYTHING in education subscribes to affecting this as well. People identify a problem: tracking is clearly and obviously racist, classist, and is also not the best way to serve students with varying needs. But in the rush to de-track, many schools dump kids who aren't prepared into classes with teachers who don't have the time to plan differentiated lessons that will reach all kids, and everyone does worse, so now we have a new problem. Detracking as explained by Dr. Thornton and supporters of Universal Design does sound like a better solution to me, but too many districts adopt things half-heartedly, without sufficient planning or training, and then throw their hands up when it "doesn't work."
Thank you for this. I have a lot of childhood baggage associated with tracking—surrounded by smart siblings and smart friends, I was the dumb one who the teachers didn’t think was smart enough for gifted and talented. My mom had to make a bit of a fuss to get me into AP classes in high school, and I did just fine when given the chance, though was never able to catch up in math. Which is its own can of worms...what about all the capable children without a feisty parent advocating for them?
When it came time for my own kids to get into these programs in elementary school I refused to have them tested, the unfairness of the whole system and the way I saw privileged parents around me gaming the system truly makes my blood boil. I do have some doubts about the wisdom of this decision-sometimes you just have to play the game-but they are all doing fine, though there were a few bumps along the way. My oldest graduated last year with an IB diploma, my middle is set to graduate at the end of the year, also with an IB diploma (one of her teachers recently told her she wished she could use her as an example of a “regular” kid being able to do the IB program. I think she meant it as a compliment and yet…). My youngest just started high school and is going to have the easiest time because when she started kindergarten the school did away with the “smart kids” class and integrated everyone. Students just swapped around for separate math classes based on ability.
I believe our high school has integrated both the IB and honors classes in the last year or so. There are for sure complaints about having to put up with kids who don’t care, but overall am so glad to see things going in this direction.
"My youngest just started high school and is going to have the easiest time because when she started kindergarten the school did away with the “smart kids” class and integrated everyone. Students just swapped around for separate math classes based on ability."
So: tracking?
(I have this same instinct, to dismiss tracking in math as somehow different than in other subjects, but when I interrogate that instinct I'm not sure it's true. I would love to hear from someone who can speak to this.)
I happen to be reading a book about math at the moment and one of the chapters is about the downsides of tracking in math. It's called What's Math Got to Do with It, by Jo Boaler.
Just FYI, Jo Boaler tends to make a LOT of claims that are not backed by peer-reviewed research. Many, many disagree with her approach. The Lucy Calkins of Math?
Absolutely tracking, and it's still problematic. But less so? At least, in my very limited experience, it seems better now than how it was being done before. I do know of kids who have been gotten stuck early and were never able to get off the path they were placed on. From talking to other parents, the school district seems absolutely unmovable in regards to math once a kid is tracked. I too would like to hear from someone who could speak to math in particular. When I was a junior in high school I had a teacher with whom math finally made sense and since then have wondered if it wasn't so much me being bad at math as much as it was the way math was being taught to me.
One issue I don’t see addressed in the tracking conversation is age-level grouping. If we get rid of aptitude-based tracking, we are still left with another kind of tracking in our schools: everyone sitting in a ninth grade English class is there simply because they’re all born in the same year. Shouldn’t we challenge that too?
We don’t do that in other learning scenarios: imagine putting absolute beginners in the same swimming class as Olympic hopefuls, just because they are all 15 years old.
I think the argument for classes by age is the social-emotional learning aspect of school, and benefits of being with your age-level peers. My 7yo may have the reading level of a 9yo, but he is absolutely not socially or emotionally ready to be in 4th grade, even if I think he’s “mature” for his age. I imagine this is only exacerbated once puberty sets in.
I see your point.
But, Montessori schools put kids in multi-age classrooms that span three grades (ages 3-6, 6-9, 9-12) and they make it work. As I argued in another comment, a big factor in it working is smaller class sizes that facilitate individualized attention, in my opinion.
The school on the island is very small and operates in two classrooms: one is K-2, and the other is 3-5. Each classroom has one teacher and an aide, and they can make that sort of learning work *because of how small the class size is.* From what parents have told me, it's really useful to have so many different emotional levels in such an intimate environment — the 5th graders are tasked with a lot of leadership, and there's a lot of pairing/mentoring with younger kids, too.
That sounds so idyllic!
Our local elementary in suburbs of DC is considered “good,” but has close to 30 kids per class.
I mean, yes, a lot of things work when you’re an expensive, selective private school that intentionally keeps class sizes small. I don’t really know what lessons can be extrapolated from that beyond “smaller class sizes and money in education are good.”
I can't wait to read this book and all the comments.
I can only speak to my experience as parent of elementary schoolers in the most diverse school in a diverse city - and our school has both extreme racial and socioeconomic diversity. Our school and district does not track, and I have been amazed by the way they have attempted to support my children who test several grades above his grade level. In some ways I think it is wonderful that he is in the same classroom and he is able to support his classmates and I used to be a big supporter of tracking.
Post-pandemic, however, I am less sure about detracking. My kids are bored, but much more importantly, learning loss is profound for so many students. It's asking so much of teachers to accommodate so many levels, and at the same time for students that are struggling, does it really help them to be in a class with kids that they will never be able to keep up with? How must that make them feel? Furthermore, as middle school approaches, as our district is a lottery district, families are already splitting (much more along socio-economic lines than racial lines) to pursue more challenging paths for the advanced students, and the kids furthest from opportunity end up at the schools with the fewest resources. I really don't know what the solution is, but my biggest takeaway is the structural issues trump everything; it's so much bigger than schools, and I am skeptical that schools can be the thing that makes the world more equitable.
Yeah, it's hard not to have a takeaway of "these are all great ideas for places with resources." Meanwhile in Ohio, public schools are being drained of all their resources in favor of a private/charter/parochial system that only benefits kids who already have resources and it feels like we have no way out.
I was tracked as a kid, also in G&T. It was complicated and I was grateful to be in classes where it was okay to be smart. This was suburban CT in late 80s, early 90s.
Fast forward to being a parent in Metrowest Boston with 2 boys on an IEP and one daughter who is brilliant but bored at school and does the bare minimum and gets good grades.
I am surprised that the gender differences in tracking and achievement have not been addressed. There is some good scholarship on this. My boys aggressively min-max their characters...they test at the top and bottom of their neuropsych evals. I don't look at their standardized testing because I think that stuff is pretty bunk. No school has ever known what to do with them.
Teachers look at my oldest who has a 140 IQ but can literally barely hold a pencil to write, and judge him on his written work. The end. He has felt dumb for his entire school career and it has had SERIOUS practically hospitalization level mental health consequences. This kid is going to join the Navy next year and become a welder. Judging him on written work he can't produce is just such a disservice to kids like him.
Same with my middle boy...didn't get his autism diagnosis till 14 because he is smart enough to get by in school. Now that he has it...they STILL don't know what to do with him because again...brilliant...but processing speed of a sloth.
I guess I am saying that I AM that parent with the kids on the IEPs. These conversations all seem to have my kids as an afterthought.
I agree with the other posters in that it just sounds like we de-track into other tracks. Public schooling is just really complex. There probably isn't one right answer and a lot of the answers seem to pit one kid's need against another kid.
I also think that the emphasis on de-centralizing individual experiences is pretty unhelpful. The brains of the kids going through the public education process literally don't have the neurons to decentralize their experiences. It is okay to say this is what my experience was. You can only talk of your own anyway.
Currently: my own first-grader has a kid in her class who is moving to second grade on Monday. She is sad her friend is leaving but is also new to this possibility of skipping a grade because you are smart enough. SO she has spent the weekend teaching her pre-K sister everything she knows so that younger sister can skip right to Kindergarten. I'm going to ride the high of my kids practicing their handwriting instead of begging for screen time before I tell them that their plan, though adorable, is futile.
"[Little sister] is learning so much!!! I'm teaching her diagraphs, which she keeps forgetting so we will have to review them another day." -Big Sister
Little sister just got an F+ in writing her numbers. 🥹
In the Netherlands we select children at the age of 11-12 into tracks that are then largely offered by different schools based on whether they are more practical or theoretically. Sometimes a school will offer both practical and theoretical once, but then the practical and theoretical tracks are often offered in separate buildings.
The decision which track a student will go to is based on an advice given by their teacher the last year of elementary school. That advice in its turn is based on a bunch of standardized test they took throughout their school years, but also for a large part on the feelings the teacher has for the student. As you can imagine, study after study shows that a lot of biases are present in the process, just like the ones mentioned in the interview. There is one last standardized tests that corrects for that to make sure kids are not placed "too low", but this year is the first year that placements will actually be corrected based on that.
All in all 11 or 12 is way too young to select a track for students, given how much kids that age are still developing. More and more that view is also finding political support and I hope that the proposal to postpone our selection moment by two years will make it into law soon.