Education Week - March 27, 2013 - 8

EDUCATION WEEK

MARCH 27, 2013

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More Teachers Group
Students by Ability
Study finds oft-disparaged approach rising
By Sarah D. Sparks
After being condemned as discriminatory in the 1990s, grouping
students by academic ability seems
to be back in vogue with a new generation of teachers, according to an
analysis of federal teacher data.
The study, “The Resurgence of
Ability Grouping and Persistence
of Tracking,” is part of an annual
report on education released last
week by the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Washingtonbased Brookings Institution.
While different terms for sorting students are often used interchangeably, ability grouping
generally refers to the practice—
primarily in elementary grades—of
separating students for instruction
within a single class.
By contrast, tracking is the practice, more often used in middle and
high schools, of putting students
who have different starting-point
ability ranges into classes with
correspondingly distinct difficulty
levels within the same subject
area—for example, Algebra 1 versus pre-algebra in middle school.
A 4th grader who took the National Assessment of Educational
Progress in 1998 had less than an
even chance of being grouped by

reading ability, but the odds were
9-to-1 in favor of such grouping by
2009, according to the Brookings
Institution analysis of teachers’ reports collected in conjunction with
the assessment.
Teachers were also asked—twice
before 1998 and again in 2011—if
they created math groups primarily
based on ability, as opposed to interest or other factors. The percentage who answered affirmatively fell
from 48 percent to 40 percent from
1992 to 1996, increased to 42 percent in 2003, and then rose sharply
to 61 percent in 2011.
“I was shocked,” said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at Brookings
and the author of the study. “After
suffering through a decade in the
1990s in which both ability grouping and tracking were thought to
be taboo, ability grouping is coming
back so strong.”
In part, the new trend may be a
generational issue: A majority of
teachers in 2011 had not been in
the field in the 1990s, when the
debate over tracking and ability
grouping was at its height. Several high-profile studies on ability
grouping and tracking, including
the educational equity scholar
Jeannie Oakes’ 1985 book Keeping
Track: How Schools Structure In-

BACK IN VOGUE
The percentage of teachers who say they group students by ability for mathematics
instruction has grown substantially since the early 1990s, including a rapid upswing
since 2007, according to a new analysis from the Brookings Institution.

1992

1996

48%

2006 2007

2009
54

2011

61%

SOURCE: National Center for Education Statistics

equality, found that ability grouping often ends up being a proxy for
sorting by socioeconomic class.
The practice came under widescale criticism as being discriminatory against minority students and
those from poor families, who were
disproportionately put into lowerlevel groups and classes. Researchers found that, as in “separate but
equal” segregated schooling arrangements, students in lower academic groups and tracks were given
less high-quality instruction and
were not spurred to catch up with
classmates in higher-level groups.
Some research also concluded
teachers were able to devote less
instructional time to individual

change

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I was excited about this
program because I knew it
would help me become a
better teacher. Helping these
kids overcome their personal
obstacles is my biggest goal.
With the right tools and the
right leadership any school
can succeed.
Ellen Zambetti, M.Ed.
teaching and learning
in urban schools

peabody.vanderbilt.edu

2003

Great

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2000

subgroups in classes with static
ability groups.
In a resolution first set out in
1998 and reaffirmed in 2005, the
National Education Association,
the nation’s largest teachers’ union,
officially calls for eliminating “the
use of discriminatory academic
tracking based on economic status,
ethnicity, race, or gender ... in all
public school settings.”
In 1998, the year of the nea resolution, 39 percent of reading teachers whose students participated
in naep reported that they did not
group students for instruction at
all, and only 28 percent said they
grouped students by ability.
But by 2009, according to the
Brookings study, more than 70
percent of teachers reported ability
grouping in reading, and only 8 percent relied on whole-class instruction as their primary method.
Because prior research has
shown that ability grouping is most
often used in early grades and tapers off through elementary school,
Mr. Loveless said the naep 4th
grade teacher surveys likely underestimate the prevalence of ability grouping in elementary schools
overall.

Possible Benefits?
Meanwhile, some emerging research suggests that, in some cases,
flexible ability grouping can in fact
benefit students.
In a separate study released in
February of students in Dallas
public schools, economists Courtney A. Collins of Rhodes College,
in Macon, Ga., and Li Gan of Texas
a&m University, in College Station, found that sorting students
into different courses by previous
academic-test performance was
associated with higher academic
achievement not just for the highperforming students, but for struggling students as well.
The researchers found that
nearly 75 percent of the 135
schools studied sorted students, either within class or among classes,
but they were more likely to use
a specific learning-needs designation rather than ability in a single
subject.
For example, 57 percent of the

schools sorted on the basis of a student’s English-language proficiency,
and 28 percent made placements
based on whether a student was
identified as gifted.
By contrast, fewer than one in
four schools grouped students on
the basis of their prior reading-test
performance, and fewer than one
in five sorted according to math
performance. Nearly 40 percent of
the schools used at least two different ability-level indicators to sort
students.
The researchers found that students in both high- and low-level
groups performed better when
grouped with peers who had performed similarly on the previous
year’s math and reading tests.
“These results,” conclude Ms. Collins and Mr. Gan, “give credence to
the line of reasoning that suggests
that more homogeneous classes
allow teachers to teach to a more
narrow range of students, which is
beneficial for both high- and lowscoring individuals” in reading and
math.
The findings may point to why
teachers continue to group students
by ability even at the risk of reinforcing disparities among them.
“Teachers still think they are
faced with a really wide variety
of students, and they think they
need this tool in order to reduce
the achievement [differences] they
face,” Mr. Loveless said. “Ability
grouping and tracking just never
go away.”
However, Ms. Collins and Mr.
Gan’s study also found that students in special education who
were grouped separately from other
students had lower achievement
in both math and reading, though
only reading performance was significantly impaired.
The National Center for Education Statistics plans to analyze
teachers’ approaches to ability
grouping and tracking in more
depth next year, based on its 201112 Schools and Staffing Survey,
which is due out later this spring.

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Education Week - March 27, 2013

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