Differentiating Instruction-The New Tracking

Here’s a true story.

A friend of mine is severely dyslexic. He doesn’t choose to tell people this for obvious reasons, but he confided in me when we became friends. His disability was caught fairly early and he was lucky enough to attend a private K-8 school. In high school , he went to a top notch city school where he was provided with tutors and a paraprofessional who helped him to take notes in class.

He went on to attend a fairly prestigious university where he again was provided an aide in the classroom. Through some very hard work and the services provided by the university, he went on to achieve a Master’s Degree.

Great story, right? Don’t we, as educators, feel really good about ourselves right now? I did when I first met him and heard his story.

As I got to know him better, though, I wasn’t so convinced; in fact I felt pretty awful about the whole thing.

You see, he entered a profession that required a great deal of writing-and there are no aides or paraprofessionals on the job to help him write. He used to send me his memos that he was going to put out to the staff. They were horrible. I re-wrote them by email and sent them back to him. It didn’t matter though, because I wasn’t always around to fix his writing. In the few years I have known him, he has lost about three jobs. We haven’t spoken in months, but the last I heard through mutual friends is that he is unemployed and severely depressed.

I’m not a Special Education teacher, but I am guessing that his disability is very severe. It’s not that he didn’t get the best help possible or that he didn’t try-his strength is not writing.

Why the heck then, did everyone encourage him to go into a profession that required writing? The truth is that he is really good at and enjoys working with his hands. He didn’t want to go into a trade because vocations are looked down upon. I’m not sure where this thinking comes from, but the people I know who work in trades make a hell of a lot more money than I do and they don’t have student loans trailing them for life.

The educational community failed my friend. We didn’t want him to feel bad about himself when he was in school, so we gave him a false view of his abilities. We decided that it was better for him to feel good about himself while in school and then be miserable for the rest of his life. We do this all the time.

For some reason, education has completely removed itself from the real world. Researchers and ivory tower professors are dictating what should be happening in schools. All children should study academics, they say. All children should attend college. Apparently, all children are the same. Guess what, they’re not.

When I was studying to become a teacher, we were taught that tracking was a horrible practice. It killed children’s self esteem. It separated students and made them feel different. I couldn’t believe that the evil high school that I attended had subjected me to such elitist practices. As a new teacher, I was grateful that my school didn’t indulge in such barbaric practices. And then I taught for a few years…

Tracking or ability grouping saw a decrease in popularity in the 1970’s and 80’s, but it was Jeannie Oaks’ popularly quoted book, Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality that really caused educational institutions to move in favor of de-tracking. According to Oaks, tracking does not benefit lower level students and dooms them to failure. Hmmm… So placing them in classes in which they cannot keep up is not dooming them to failure?

Many teachers who teach in schools that favor detracking express enormous frustration over the fact that very few children are being helped other than those who are “in the middle.” Higher level students are bored. How many brilliant kids walk the hall every day, bored out of their minds? Lower level students are equally as frustrated because they can’t keep up. They act out, cut class or simply drop out. So who then, is being helped?

According to the Eisenhower South West Consortium, “parents, students, and teachers tended to prefer tracking, while administrators and educational researchers and professors of education preferred detracking.” So excuse me if I’m wrong, but aren’t parents, students, and teachers the stakeholders who are most in touch with what is happening in the classroom? Why are we listening to individuals who are clearly out of touch with reality?

Now, however, the theorists have come up with a new solution; differentiating instruction. Teachers can handle the mixed abilities in their classrooms by differentiating their instruction. Teachers should have different lessons for different level students. Lesson plans should reflect questions and activities for the high, middle and low level students in their classes. Hello???? Isn’t that tracking?

I absolutely love the following lines that open an article from ASCD about Differentiating Instruction:

Brain research confirms what experienced teachers have always known:

• No two children are alike.
• No two children learn in the identical way.
• An enriched environment for one student is not necessarily enriched for another.

Would someone please tell them to make up their minds?

I predict that in a few years, brain research will confirm that tracking benefits students. Much ado will be made about the research and professors will be touting the ‘new’ philosophy. In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of children will have suffered because these ‘researchers’ have absolutely no common sense.

My best friend in high school was in a different track than I was. I loved academics. He did not. After high school, he went on to attend a small, technical school. I went on to study the humanities in a large university.

He currently works in television production and has worked his way up. He’s actually kind of famous now in the television world. He even won an Emmy Award. I had dinner with him the other night in his new condo. He paid close to a million dollars for it.

I would like to invite him to my new place, but there’s not much room in my small one bedroom apartment.

Lucky for him he didn’t listen to the researchers.

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