Tracking (education)

Tracking is separating students by academic ability into groups for all subjects or certain classes and curriculum within a school. It may be referred to as streaming or phasing in some schools. In a tracking system, the entire school population is assigned to classes according to whether the students' overall achievement is above average, normal, or below average. Students attend academic classes only with students whose overall academic achievement is the same as their own. Students with special educational needs may be tracked into a self-contained classroom or a separate special school, rather than being included in a mixed-ability class. Ability grouping is not synonymous with tracking. Tracking differs from ability grouping by scale and permanence. Ability groups are small, informal groups formed within a single classroom. Assignment to an ability group is often short-term (never lasting longer than one school year), and varies by subject. Assignment to an ability group is made by (and can be changed at any time by) the individual teacher, and is usually not recorded in student records. For example, a teacher may divide a typical mixed-ability classroom into three ability groups for a mathematics lesson: those who need to review basic facts before proceeding, those who are ready to learn new material, and those who need a challenging assignment. For the next lesson, the teacher may revert to whole-class, mixed-ability instruction, or may assign students to different ability groups. Tracking and its various modifications are among the predominant organizing practices of American public schools, and have been an accepted feature of the country's schools for nearly a century. Coming into use at a time when schools were enrolling growing numbers of immigrant children as the result of compulsory schooling laws, tracking was adopted as a means of sorting those children viewed as having limited preparation or capacity for schooling from native children. Unfortunately, however, tracking quickly took on the appearance of internal segregation.