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An MCPS Elementary School Teacher’s Perspective on “Tracking”
Marc Elrich, Teacher
In the years leading up to her candidacy for the District 4 seat on the Montgomery County Board of Education, Valerie Ervin has repeatedly charged, both personally and through statements issued by her Montgomery County Education Forum, that minority students in our schools are “tracked” by second grade and thereby denied the opportunity to receive the best instruction—instruction reserved for students who are designated “gifted and talented” (GT). Ms. Ervin and the MCEF claim that this alleged tracking is the source of the well-known “achievement gap” by race and ethnicity that persists throughout schooling. As an elementary school teacher with more than a dozen years experience, I would like to share my perspective on these charges.
Let me begin by stating categorically that the tracking charge is simply untrue. Tracks do not exist in the Montgomery County Public Schools, and the schools certainly do not sort children by race. There is no test that separates all children in the second grade into two tracks, each receiving a separate and unequal education. Most children are not labeled GT, and those labeled as such are generally NOT taught different content in different classes. To suggest that second graders are tested and separated and thereafter given different educational opportunities is a gross misrepresentation of both policy and practice in Montgomery County.
It is also untrue that good instruction is reserved for the lucky few. Even in the higher grades, GT and non-GT students are exposed to essentially the same curriculum and very similar instructional methods, and teachers routinely discuss how to extend use of higher-level instruction. GT content most often consists of extensions of the basic curriculum, and most teachers offer such extensions to every student that can handle them, without regard to labels. It is appropriate to differentiate by extending instruction for students who are academically ready for it, just as it is appropriate to provide additional academic support and remediation for those students who are struggling. That is how teachers meet the diverse needs of individual students. It is senseless and unfair to try to force children to do work for which they are not ready, and it is equally wrong to deny children accelerated work when they are ready for it.
Finally, it is difficult to believe that anyone thinks that the method of instruction we use in the schools is the basis of the achievement gap, a gap that already exists when children walk through the schoolhouse door. The gap is present before an MCPS schoolteacher has said his or her first "Good morning, children." The idea that we should “use gifted and talented methodology for everyone,” as Ms. Ervin advocates, may sound attractive, but it betrays an ignorance of what actually goes on in our schools. The very notion that teachers have a specific methodology reserved for GT children is a myth. There is no "gifted and talented methodology” per se; rather there is a range of methodologies from which a teacher chooses the most appropriate—that is, the one most likely to move the students—for any given situation. A competent teacher will use different methodologies to teach different students the same subject in the same classroom. To do otherwise is to deny that students have different needs. The teacher’s job is to address each student’s needs in a way that ensures that each is challenged.
Putting a diverse mix of students in the same elementary classes, as we do, is a good thing. But discouraging flexible grouping based on need is a prescription for disaster for everyone. Effective differentiation of instruction within a single class is only possible when the spectrum of needs in the class is fairly narrow. If the spectrum is too wide, no one’s needs are met very well; those who don’t “get it” will continue to be lost, those who “get it” quickly or came through the door with “it” will be bored to tears, and those in the middle will just muddle through.
Does grouping by need become de facto tracking? Not in my experience. I have seen many children in low-level reading groups move up and out of those groups. I have frequently seen kids in a low-level math group sit in a high-level reading group, and vice versa. I have seen kids articulated from a lower group one year into a higher group the following year.
Superintendent Weast has read the research about how early the gap develops and has pushed the County to address early childhood development. This is an important step, as is the expansion of all day kindergarten. But we continue to fall short in providing support for the remediation that struggling children need if we are to teach all children at a more uniform level. Remediation means instruction tailored to students’ needs, not putting struggling children in a group where they can’t grasp what is being taught because of vocabulary they don’t know or skills they haven’t mastered. Only the schools with the highest educational loads have received the kind of class-size reductions that are needed for effective remediation, and even in those schools the commitment to reducing class size does not extend to the upper grades. Furthermore, the reductions are partially offset by cutbacks in aide time. There is still inadequate staffing to reach those students who aren't "getting it", even in the best of classroom settings.
Get beyond these poorest schools, and you will still find plenty of students with unmet academic needs sitting in overcrowded classrooms just because the poverty numbers are not considered high enough to justify additional staffing. There are actually schools where parents worry that boundary shifts will raise the overall income level enough to cause reductions in staffing and increases in class size. How poor does a school have to be before students get the support they need? What we need is an all-out effort to provide the instructional staff needed to reach every child, regardless of how his or her school is classified.
Blaming the gap on a test that supposedly herds children into two groups is a distraction from our real problems. It offers a "cheap" solution—a lot cheaper than providing the instructional staff needed to provide remediation, further reduce class size, and maintain smaller class sizes throughout elementary school. But the theory just doesn’t hold up.
As I teacher, I regard the underachievement of African American and Hispanic children in our schools as shameful. To have a gap of this magnitude 40 years after the integration of the Montgomery County school system is unacceptable. I believe that the gap can be closed, but closing it requires a clear understanding of how it was created. A solution premised on the fiction that the schools created the gap through systematic policies can never take us where we need to go. The fictitious and divisive issue of “tracking” can only distract us from real solutions to the real problems facing our schools.
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