Last year, many people in the U.S. were shocked when our 13-year old students came out on the bottom in an international math and science assessment that compared them with students in South Korea, Spain, some Canadian provinces, Ireland and Great Britain. If other comparisons had been made, we'd have been shocked again. For example, only 2.6 to 6 percent of our graduating high school seniors are able to write a good essay, read something with moderately complicated sentence structure or solve a two-step math problem. In all other industrial countries, 15 to 30 percent of a comparable group of students can perform these feats. What are these other countries doing that we aren't?
There are a number of things, but one of the most important is tracking: assigning students to classes on the basis of how well they perform. Most other industrial countries track students at an early age. In Germany, for example, all students are tested in the fourth grade and, based on test results and the judgement of teachers, are placed in one of three different kinds of schools.
In the U.S., we generally oppose tracking. There are lots of reasons for this, but it's mainly because of a belief that our schools are meant to help students with different backgrounds and talents learn to live and work with one another. This is not to say that we don't track students. For instance, tracking takes place because of residential patterns and it takes place when student enroll in academic as against vocational programs. But tracking in the U.S. tends to be local and unsystematic, probably because the practice goes against some of our basic beliefs. And because it is piecemeal, we don't derive the benefit from the practice that other countries do.
When other countries use tracking they are taking into account individual differences among students. Some students can sit still and listen longer and retain more of what they hear than others. When you track students, education officials in other countries argue, you are not just helping the brightest but the others, as well. And the result is a system that does a better job than ours of preparing both college-bound students and ones who are going directly into the work force.
Of course, I am not arguing in favor of establishing a formal system of tracking in the U.S. We have rejected the practice for good reasons. The trouble is, we have not come up with an attractive way of dealing with the range of individual differences in our students. But we do have a model to learn from the one-room school.
Teachers in one-room schoolhouses almost never lectured. These teachers knew there wasn't much they could say simultaneously to a roomful of kids of different ages and stages of learning. So teacher moved from one group of two or three students to another. Because they couldn't spend much time with any group, they usually assigned some work to each, making sure that the group had a pretty good idea of how to proceed. Periodically, the teacher would return to each group to make sure the work was being done correctly and to offer help where it was needed. And teachers frequently asked students who'd mastered a particular task to help those who were still struggling to learn it.
These teachers had to work in this way because of the vast differences among children. Today, this practice is rare, but the issue of individual differences persists. For example, it's not hard to find a seventh- or eighth-grade class in which one or two students are still at the third-grade level in reading or math, a few others are at fourth-grade level, many are at the seventh- or eighth-grade level and some are able to do ninth- and tenth-grade work. But the fact that our heterogeneous seventh- and eighth-graders are all about the same age leads us to organize the class so they are all expected to do the same work in the same way and roughly within the same period of time. No wonder so many of them are bored or feel lost - and no wonder so many of their teachers are frustrated. Most teachers probably try to strike a balance by pitching their lessons to the "average" student, but this means that many students won't be able to understand what's going on while many more will be bored and will come to believe that it is not necessary to do much in school because the work is so easy.
If we insist on organizing our schools to promote this kind of teaching, then tracking of some sort is essential. But there is no need to abandon our values. Teachers in one-room schools managed to teach kids with an eight-year age range, and we should be able to manage classrooms with a similar range of differences. Nor should we view this way of doing things as inferior to our current system. What oneroom school teachers did out of necessity -- avoid teacher talk and get kids to do work on their own or in small groups -- is actually a superior way of getting them to learn.
If that is so, why haven't more teachers done it this way? There are many reasons. For one, teachers are expected to "cover" the curriculum with all the students in the course of a year; kids are supposed to learn in lock step. And, many teachers would tell you, even if school restructuring released them and their students from that straitjacket, we'd still have a problem. Teachers are so burdened with work that the last thing they'd be likely to welcome is the opportunity to prepare individual work for each student, or even for seven or ten different groups of students.
Does this send us back to tracking? Not at all. It points us to the uses of technology - a topic I'll deal with in a future column.