An ASCD Study Guide for Detracking for Excellence and Equity

This chapter presents a historical overview of the detracking of the Rockville Centre schools. Create a flowchart or graphic organizer that maps the tracking system in Rockville Centre's middle and high schools in the 1980s and another flowchart or graphic organizer that depicts the Rockville Centre system today. Next, create two visual depictions of your own school system—one from the 80s and one that maps the current system.

1. Compare both Rockville Centre's past and present systems with your own district's past and present system. Has there been a change? Has tracking been reduced, remained the same, or expanded? Identify events in your district that could be associated with changes in the tracking system (e.g., demographic shifts, change in leadership, curricular changes).
2. Using your district's high school transcripts from the 1980s as well as recent transcripts (with identifying data redacted), trace the course of students through the system by track. Is there evidence of upward track mobility? Downward movement? Is the trajectory stable?
3. Using demographic data from your district (i.e., race, socioeconomic status, ethnicity), tally track placement. Are there demographic patterns regarding placement and movement?

Chapter 2: What Tracking Is and How to Start Dismantling It

The authors describe common tracking systems (e.g. ability grouping, leveling systems, and streaming) and, on page 17, concur with Oakes (2005) that "whatever the title or the structure, if some students are grouped together and required to take a course apart from other students, it is a form of tracking."

1. Based on the above description, identify the variety of ways that your school or district groups students for instruction. On what basis is a student's group assignment made? How subjective or objective are the criteria?
   As cited on page 23, Welner (2001) found that few tracked classes are truly homogenous in so-called ability or skill.
2. Using an objective measure, such as achievement test scores, determine the range of scores of students in each track or level in your school. How homogeneous are the classes? To determine if the range expands or contracts as the track progresses, trace the percentile scores of a lower-track student over time. Does tracking appear to have a longitudinal impact on learning?
   One of the assessments that schools commonly use to place students in tracks is the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. Developed in the early 1900s, this test quickly become so popular that when Harvard psychologist Edward Boring was asked in 1920 to define intelligence, he responded by saying that intelligence is what the Stanford-Binet measures. During a presentation at the 2008 meeting of the American Educational Research Association, another Harvard psychologist, Howard Gardner, defined intelligence quite differently: "Intelligence is bio-psychological potential to process information in certain ways, in order to solve problems or make things. The mind/brain is a collage; it is comprised of different modes and ways of thinking. Human intelligence is not limited and fixed, but rather plastic and expandable."
3. Contrast the implications of these two definitions of intelligence. How might Boring's definition have supported the emergence of tracking in the 1900s? What implications does Gardner's description of intelligence as "plastic and expandable" have for tracking?

Chapter 3: The Curriculum Process for Leveling-Up Instruction

The authors argue that the careful revision and implementation of curriculum is key to the success of detracking reform.

1. Research and discuss the curriculum-revision process in your district. What are the events that precipitate curriculum revision? How is curriculum presently implemented? What processes are in place to ensure that the curriculum is being implemented by all teachers?
2. If your school or school district were to embark on a detracking reform, how well would your present process mesh with the reform? How might you change it to ensure the development of a high-level "honors" curriculum for all?
3. To what extent do you agree with the authors that school leader involvement is critical in the creation of curricula for detracked classes?
4. What systems could be put in place in your school or district to ensure that a detracked curriculum is implemented well and that curriculum is not "watered down"?
5. The authors assert that there is no justification for offering some students an inferior curriculum, as this practice increases the achievement gap. Discuss this belief. How does it compare with the philosophy in your school system?
6. What strategies in curriculum development do you currently employ in an effort to close the achievement gap? How successful have these strategies been?

Chapter 4: The Politics of Detracking

This chapter covers the complicated process of obtaining staff and parent buy-in for detracking reform.

1. What are the beliefs and self-interests that sustain tracking in your district? Begin with an honest examination of your own beliefs and self-interests. If detracking were to proceed in your district, what kinds of fears might stakeholders have?
2. The authors argue that there are "three Ps" that sustain tracking: prejudice, prestige and power. Do you agree with this assessment? If so, to what extent do the "three Ps" undergird support for tracking in your district?
   The authors report that the best way to confront the "three Ps" is to help opponents of detracking learn from data. They suggest the collection and analysis of the following:
   1. Demographic data—The proportions of student groups in each class level or track by race, geographic area, and socioeconomic status.
   2. Resource data—The outside resources available to students.
   3. Teaching data—The years of experience and educational credentials of teachers by course and track level.
3. After collecting the data listed above, use them to analyze your response to question 2. How can you use your conclusions to make a compelling argument that tracking should be eliminated or reduced? How might you quell the fears of those who support the status quo?

Chapter 5: Professional Development for Equitable Practices

In The New Meaning of Educational Change (1991), Michael Fullan, a prominent researcher on school reform, reports that it takes a minimum of three to five years to successfully implement innovations and more than five years to achieve meaningful school reform.

1. How did the reform process in Rockville Centre bear out Fullan's research? Reflect on examples of intensive and sustained staff development that supported the district's detracking initiative.
2. Reflect on staff development initiatives in which you have participated, and identify one that you think was particularly successful. What were its essential elements? How do these compare with the research synthesis of Weiss and Pasley (2006), summarized on page 66?
3. Think about the structure of your school day and school year. What time is available for thoughtful discussions, for professional development, and for both veteran and new teachers to implement curriculum?
4. Rockville Centre established personalized days for professional development. Would this approach be feasible in your school or district? If so, how could you structure these days to begin a detracking reform?
5. Does your district have a professional development program for new teachers? If yes, what activities do you believe would best support movement toward detracking and why? If you do not have this kind of program, review the components of the program Rockville Centre employed with new teachers and identify those activities that might fit in your district.

Chapter 6: Teaching and Learning in the Heterogeneous Classroom

The authors emphasize that active learning is critical in detracked classrooms. On page 103, they list questions that can help teachers develop differentiated lessons that incorporate active student participation.

1. How could school leaders support teachers in creating and teaching lessons that are guided by the principles of active participation? Analyze the four questions on page 103. What others might you add?
2. Create a simple rubric describing the level of active participation and differentiation for use in lesson observation.
   Meeting the needs of all learners in one classroom is the most challenging aspect of detracking. Chapter 6, along with previous chapters, describes some of the strategies that teachers in Rockville Centre use to provide support for students who struggle and challenge for students who learn quickly.
3. Summarize some of the techniques and strategies Rockville Centre uses to meet the needs of atypical students at the elementary, middle, and high school levels.
4. Which strategies do your teachers use now? How could these strategies be adapted to promote differentiation in a heterogeneous classroom?

Chapter 7: Maintaining the Reform and Pushing Forward

The authors state that it is important to ascertain during employment interviews whether candidates for teacher or administrator positions hold beliefs that would enable them to be successful in a detracked school.

1. If you were on a hiring committee, what qualities would you expect to find in these candidates? What questions would you ask?
2. Do you agree with the authors' contention, on page 137, that "there are educators who would be successful in a tracked school but would not succeed in a detracked, inclusive environment." To what extent should a candidate's educational philosophy play a prominent role in hiring?
   This chapter presents an overview of the authors' recommended model of supervision. In some ways, it is quite traditional and "top down"; in other ways, it is collegial and innovative. They conclude their discussion by saying, on page 146, that "detracking cannot work well if it is implemented in a school culture where doors are shut and other adults rarely enter. Even as heterogeneous classrooms are communities of diverse learners, so must the school become a community of diverse adult learners."
3. How open are your classrooms to other adults, both colleagues and administrators? What aspects of the authors' supervisory model are similar to yours? In what ways are they dissimilar?
4. What are the essential aspects of the authors' model that would help you implement a detracking reform in your school or district. What would you change to provide a more effective model of supervision for detracking? Use the literature on the supervision of instruction to justify your opinions.

Chapter 8: The Essentials of Excellence with Equity

In Chapter 2, the authors discuss the belief systems regarding intelligence and ability that sustain tracking. In this final chapter of the book, they return to beliefs, outlining those associated with a detracking reform.

1. Why do you think the authors chose to wait until Chapter 8 to identify and describe the belief system that supports and sustains a detracking reform? Were all the beliefs discussed in pages 148–155 congruent with the reform described in the book? Based on Chapter 8, what additional changes might you expect Rockville Center to implement in the future?
   In The New Meaning of Educational Change (1991), Michael Fullan notes that changes in behavior often precede changes in belief. By moving forward with implementation even as some teachers and parents counseled delay, school leaders in Rockville Centre recognized that time, work, and actual evidence of success would be needed to change some people's beliefs.
2. Do you agree with Fullan and with the strategy pursued by Rockville Centre? What strategies did the district employ to alter the beliefs of those who initially opposed the reform?
3. Who are the potential leaders of your district's detracking reform? Where might those leaders influence change? What strategies might they use to encourage those who oppose detracking to suspend their disbelief?
4. Review the authors' key beliefs that support detracking, discussed on pages 148–155:
   • Schools and opportunity matter
   • Acceleration and enrichment improve students' achievement
   • All students have gifts and talents
   • The achievement gap can close
   • Schools have an obligation to be learning organizations
   • Teaching requires great skill and extraordinary dedication
   • School leadership requires vision and courage
   • Education is the fundamental method of social progress
   • Success can be a bountiful harvest
   
   Create a series of continuums, with each of the above these beliefs located on one end of a line and a competing belief located on the other. For example:
   
   
   
5. After creating your belief continuums, place yourself on the line in a position that best represents your beliefs at the moment. Think back to when you were a third-year teacher. Have you shifted in one direction or the other? If so, why?
6. Where on the continuum would you place your colleagues? How about the parents in your district? The students? To what extent do you think present beliefs reflect your school system's current structure? To what extent might beliefs change if a detracking reform were put in place?

Fullan, M. (1991) The new meaning of educational change. New York: Teachers College Press.

Gardner, H. (2008, March 24). Multiple intelligences theory after 25 years: Promises, possibilities, and pitfalls. Presentation at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. New York.

Oakes, J. (2005). Keeping track: How schools structure inequality (2nd ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Weiss, I., & Pasley, J. (2006). Scaling up instructional improvement through teacher professional development: Insights from the local systemic change initiative. CPRE Policy Briefs. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania.

Welner, K. G. (2001). Legal rights, local wrongs: When community control collides with educational equity. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Detracking for Excellence and Equity was written by Carol Corbett Burris and Delia T. Garrity. This 176-page, 6" x 9" book (Stock #108013; ISBN-13: 978-1-4166-0708-3) is available from ASCD for $20.95 (ASCD member) or $26.95 (nonmember). Copyright © 2008 by ASCD. To order a copy, call ASCD at 1-800-933-2723 (in Virginia 1-703-578-9600) and press 2 for the Service Center. Or buy the book from ASCD's Online Store.