To End High School Tracking, We Need to End Tracking in Elementary School
Why "leveled reading" leads to leveled lives.
Garrison Keillor’s fictional Lake Wobegon was famously a place where all the children were above average. In one large suburban school district, some high schools are trying to turn that dream into a reality by putting all students in honors classes.
A growing number of high schools in Maryland's Montgomery County, which serves 163,000 students, are doing away with standard classes in subjects like health, social studies, science, and English. Instead, all students are being placed in honors classes. District-level officials say they’re not sure how many of the county’s 25 high schools have adopted this policy—and they’re neither encouraging nor discouraging the trend—but leaders of the local PTA estimate that more than half have gone the honors-only route in at least one core subject.
The impetus is laudable: Educators are concerned that the district’s increasing numbers of disadvantaged students—students of color, English language learners and those from low-income families—are ending up in standard classes, while white and Asian students are overrepresented in honors classes.
“We were essentially tracking students,” one high school social studies teacher told the Washington Post, “and it was affecting black and brown students disproportionately. We were seeing segregation, for lack of a better word.”
Those defending the all-honors idea say it raises teachers’ expectations—and most students, they contend, will rise to meet them. Besides, they say, the curriculum and tests are the same for honors and non-honors classes, with the only difference being that students in honors classes are able to get more credit, boosting their GPA and giving them a leg up in college applications. (The district’s official guidelines say the curriculum is the same, but “honors courses require greater use of abstract and higher-level thinking skills, and require research and projects of a more rigorous and challenging nature.”)
This is only the latest twist in a decades-long effort to mold the American high school into an engine of economic justice and social mobility—an effort that has yet to bear fruit. High school used to be an elite institution: in the 19th century, relatively few students went past eighth grade. But between 1870 and 1940, the number attending high school increased by a multiple of almost ninety, even though the country’s population only tripled.
Faced with a massive influx of ill-prepared students, high schools introduced tracking. Students headed to college—generally those from wealthier families—were placed on the academic track, while others were relegated to vocational tracks or courses like “Language Activities” and “Health and Happiness.” Often students were funneled into tracks based on their IQ scores, which were thought to measure inherent and unchangeable intellectual capacities.
Fortunately, it became politically unacceptable to openly advocate tracking beginning in the late 1960s. But de facto tracking has continued unabated, both between and within schools. The largest-scale form of tracking is socioeconomic school segregation: high schools in poor neighborhoods rarely provide the same quality of education as those in affluent areas. In pursuit of equity, high-poverty schools have started directing more of their students to AP classes. But that that often only leads to watered-down rigor and high rates of failure on externally graded AP exams.
In schools serving diverse populations, tracking is internal. Students from lower-income families usually populate the standard classes, while others enroll in honors—or in “college-level” classes like AP or International Baccalaureate. If schools make honors classes the default setting, as those in Montgomery County are doing, what will likely happen is that higher-achieving students will desert them in favor of those college-level classes, turning honors classes into the de facto standard track.
The reason for the persistence of tracking isn’t just a matter of low teacher expectations. Nor is the fundamental cause racism or implicit bias. The basic problem is that—just as in the late 19th and early 20th century—many students, and especially those who are disadvantaged, are arriving at high school unprepared to do high school-level work. The differences in academic ability that become so apparent in high school don’t begin there. And as long as educators and reformers keep focusing their efforts at the high school level, without looking carefully at what happens before high school, they’re doomed to failure.
If you want to see tracking that is not only openly conducted but enthusiastically embraced—and that is the root cause of the de facto tracking that inevitably occurs in high school—all you have to do is look at American elementary schools. There it’s called “leveled reading.” The premise is that reading comprehension is a set of skills, like “finding the main idea” and “identifying a sequence of events.” Teachers demonstrate those “skills,” using a text chosen because it seems to lend itself to whatever the skill-of-the-week is. Students then “practice” the skills using texts at what are considered their individual reading levels, which may be far below their grade level. The idea is that if students master the supposed skills on books easy enough for them to read independently, they’ll eventually catch up to where they need to be.
There’s no evidence this system works, and for good reason. Cognitive scientists have known for decades that the most important determinant of reading comprehension isn’t abstract skill; it’s how much background knowledge the reader has relating to the topic. Children who arrive at school with more general knowledge and vocabulary—usually because they’ve picked it up from their highly educated parents—start out as better readers, and they continue to acquire more and more knowledge through their reading. Their unluckier peers are shunted off to the lowest reading levels, confined to books with simpler concepts and vocabulary.
Especially since the advent of high-stakes reading tests, the lower groups are also the least likely to get exposure to subjects that might actually build their knowledge, because the theory is that working on “reading” is more important. Struggling readers are often pulled out from social studies or science classes to receive extra “skills” instruction. High-poverty schools where test scores are low have virtually eliminated everything but reading and math from the curriculum. And children with relatively little knowledge and vocabulary are unlikely to pick it up from their leveled books, which aren’t organized by topic. To build knowledge, a curriculum should stay on the same topic for a couple of weeks or more.
For students whose reading scores are low, the focus on reading “skills” can continue through middle school. When they get to high school, many have had no systematic exposure to history, science—or anything but “reading” and math. That leaves huge gaps in knowledge that can prevent them from understanding and retaining information in high school-level textbooks. If you don’t know what Europe is—or the difference between a city and a country—it’s a struggle to grasp the issues underlying World War I or II.
“Leveled texts,” one reading expert has succinctly declared, “lead to leveled lives.” That leveling—or tracking, if you will—isn’t impossible to undo once students reach high school, but it requires a lot more than putting everyone in classes labeled “honors.” A small but growing number of elementary schools across the country are starting to provide all children with access to the kind of knowledge that kids from more educated families acquire at home—and that equips them for success in high school. That's what needs to happen in Montgomery County and other districts concerned about equity in high school. It may not result in all children being above average, but it should make “average” a lot better than it is now.
This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.