On Top of the News
Grouping Students by Ability Regains Favor in Classrooms
New York Times| 6/10/13
Behind the Headline
The Detracking Movement: Why Children Are Still Grouped by Ability
Education Next |Fall 2004
In the New York Times, Vivian Yee writes about a Brookings report that traces the decline and re-birth of ability grouping in schools. “Though the issue is one of the most frequently studied by education scholars, there is little consensus about grouping’s effects,” she writes. In “The Detracking Movement: Why Children Are Still Grouped by Ability,” published by Ed Next in 2004, Maureen Hallinan took a long look at the persistence of tracking despite efforts to wipe it out.
In “Ability Grouping, Tracking, and How Schools Work,” Tom Loveless, the author of the Brookings Report, writes about some new research on the impact of tracking, and about the questions teachers ask about how best to use tracking.
In “All Together Now: Educating High and Low Achievers in the Same Classroom,” Mike Petrilli explored why it is so hard to teach kids of different abilities in the same classroom.
In “Can Tracking Improve Learning?” published in Ed Next in Summer 2009, researchers looked at how tracking affected both high- and low-achieving students in Kenya.
-Education Next
