Progressive education and the tracking debate.

In the first installment of this discussion I focused on the current state of vocational education, in historical context, with case studies of two actual school programs (Allen Graubard, "Could Vocational Education Be Progressive?" Radical Teacher 69). Here, in the second part, I want to consider the tracking issue in that style--historical context and current scene, with a case study. I will raise questions along the way about commonly accepted progressive views.

A story of how differentiated formats--especially the "comprehensive" high school--became universal in U.S. public schools is shared across the political spectrum. Bowles and Gintis write, from the left, that although the old, village school remained a nostalgic dream, "all agreed that the sheer increase in numbers of students alone necessitated bureaucratic control in the modern era. Thus Taylorism in the school was justified in the same technocratic terms [as] the hierarchical division of labor ..." (Schooling in Capitalist America; Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life, Basic Books, 1976, p. 191). Democratic schooling in this view was to fit each student for his or her own life work. In conservative versions of the story (e.g., Diane Ravitch's Left Back), this was the original sin, a choice made by progressives when they could have done otherwise. For radicals, objective conditions such as the needs of capitalist elites provide explanation.

This story obviously does not include John Dewey's ideas about the conditions for effective learning, nor the "pedagogical progressive" experiments he and his daughter Evelyn described in their 1915 book Schools of To-morrow. Dewey explicitly opposed schooling that classified young people and assigned them to different programs according to likely vocational outcomes. In particular, he opposed letting the work relations of industrial capitalism govern the purposes of education. As David Labaree puts it, progressives see the process of tracking students toward eventual kinds of work as "a mechanism that blocks individual chances for social mobility and political equality by means of a self-fulfilling prophecy--predicting a working-class job role for a working-class student and then preparing him or her in such a way that any other outcome is unlikely" (How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning: The Credentials Race in American Education, Yale University Press, 1997, p. 40). In this perspective, progressives are those who historically have opposed the social efficiency approach, which responds to the interests of business most directly through tracking--ironically, the core innovation of social efficiency progressives.

There is little light to be cast by fretting about the historically or intellectually correct use of the term "progressive." What is important is staying aware that the term does not work as a clear reference, and that in any case the historical origins of an institution cannot fully explain its current meaning and role. In this essay I want to question rather than repeat the condemnation of tracking--which stance is not in any simple way "radical" opposition to the powers that be. First, a look at the educational research on "tracking." That the debate has reached a high level of public media visibility was marked by an item in the New York Times Sunday Magazine of September 28, 2003. In summarizing the opposed positions, it described a recent overview of the extensive and disputed research on tracking and ability grouping. (1) The main message was that the issue is complicated, the studies don't settle it, and experts disagree on what the research shows. No expert myself, I have read some studies, and understand the broad summary often given: that students in lower tracks, across the entire set of American public high schools, come out lower than their untracked counterparts in measured academic achievement; while high track students either do just as well in non-tracked classes, or (here the research is ambiguous) they do somewhat better in tracked classes. The Times item endorsed roughly this summary. There are many difficulties with this research, including that of finding enough real situations where there is no tracking, given how universal the practice is. But here I will simply register this highly abstract characterization of what is claimed for the data.

Considering the mildness of that claim, moral and political judgments are sharp and intense. For a specially vivid example, I glance at an essay from a highly respected political writer, Walter Karp, for years associated with Harper's, "Why Johnny Can't Think--The Politics of Bad Schooling." (2) After representing data (from books under review) as showing the profound unfairness of the system, Karp writes, "The whole system of unfairness, inequality, and privilege comes to fruition in high school. There, some 15.7 million youngsters [early 80s data] are formally divided into the favored few and the ill-favored many by the practice of tracking." The tracking system makes privilege and inequality blatantly visible to everyone, creating under one roof "two worlds of schooling. Students in academic programs read Shakespeare plays. The commonality are allowed virtually no contact with serious literature. In their English classes they practice filling out job applications. 'Gifted' students alone are encouraged to think for themselves. The rest are subjected to sanctimonious wind.... "And so on.

Karp holds that "This wretched arrangement expresses the true spirit of public education in America and discloses the real aim of its hidden curriculum. A favored few, pampered and smiled upon, are taught to cherish privilege and despise the disfavored. The favorless many, who have majored in failure for years, are taught to think ill of themselves. Youthful spirits are broken to the world and every impulse of citizenship is effectively stifled."

Karp's coda is a call to "ordinary citizens" to take back the local control he thinks was instituted in the original years of public schooling, when the dominant, Horace Mann-style rhetoric was of "democratic citizenship." (And when almost no one went to high school, and school teachings were irrelevant to almost all work situations, and credentials acquired through formal education were hardly known.) I have to admit that I resonated to Karp's rhetorical flourishes, his condemnation of "authoritarian" methods and effects, and his call for citizen resistance to the powerful and privileged. The radical, free school writings of thirty years ago, and even liberal critiques like Charles Silberman's Crisis in the Classroom (1970), were just as sweeping and total in their characterization of deadening and alienating school methods, including, it should be noted, in the upper track "Shakespeare" classes. (On the sixties movement, see my Free the Children: Radical Reform and the Free Schools Movement, Pantheon Books, 1972)

But now, after almost twenty years (some of them spent working within urban comprehensive high schools), I am considerably less resonant and stirred to anger, and more skeptical about the way tracking is characterized. A key point for me is the presence in such critiques of a too-mechanical sense of agency. They leave out the variety of responses of the real people involved, mainly teachers and students; the varied cultures of different schools with the same formal setups; the ways opposition and accommodation interact in schools.

For example, I am skeptical about a broad social psychological judgment that the great mass of students who aren't in the highest track internalize their own inferiority and develop "broken spirits." That isn't to say that issues like the discouraging of students through negative labeling and through the "hidden curriculum" of pedagogical routines are unimportant. But responses of students are quite varied, with resistance to the messages of schools about authority and obedience quite widespread. Teachers are also not just mechanical transmitters of systemic ideologies, but are diverse and conflicted about the institutions they serve. And if old arrangements like tracking persist through devastating critique, decades after their original justifications have shifted, that's cause for further inquiry.

For instance, the tracking discussion is often grounded in the early decades of an expanding high school population of young people who are poorly educated, not likely to graduate, but easily employable in industry and agriculture. I think it must be connected to the situation now, and worked through in detailed institutional terms, to avoid simply repeating the moralized critique of tracking and thereby claiming the moral, political, and academic high ground. Given that this high ground is claimed as fervently by "hard liberals" like Diane Ravitch, far right polemicists like Phyllis Schlafly, and conservatives like William Bennett, as well as by egalitarian-minded progressives and left-liberals, one might pause on the kind of indignation so eloquently voiced in Karp's Harper's essay. Instead, one might ask: why then does tracking remain almost universal in the typical, large, shopping mall, comprehensive high school? This essay will point toward an answer, and suggest that detracking is not likely to accomplish much of what progressives or conservatives want.

One reason for the persistence of tracking comes forward in an extensive study, by UCLA researchers clearly opposed to the practice, on the politics involved in trying to change or eliminate it. (3) They based their research on observations and interviews at ten racially mixed high schools, showing how some parents use their political leverage to oppose the detracking policies implemented by administrative mandate. The study analyzed parental opposition to detracking in terms of the desire (apparently subconscious or at least not openly admitted) of "elites" to perpetuate their high status through the intergenerational transmission of privilege, based more on "cultural capital" than on "merit" (p 116). The threat that these parents would withdraw their kids and send them to private schools, and the power of elite parents to influence administrative decisions, indicate to the researchers a systematic block to "equity-based reforms" in racially mixed schools. The equity issue is dearly tied to the highly skewed demography from one track to another, with middle and upper-middle strata students (mainly white or Asian-American) dominating the upper tracks, and African-American, Latino, white working-class, and other "disadvantaged" categories overpopulating the lower track dames and programs.

It is worth noticing that standard forms of tracking can be found even in failing inner-city high schools whose students are overwhelmingly minority and there is no issue of elite parents protecting their cultural capital. For example, in an Oakland high school whose student body is over 90 percent African-American, with an achievement rating in the bottom three percent of California high schools, there were AP classes in calculus and physics, as well as "honors" classes in other subjects. Students were assigned on the basis of their past academic records. There was no discussion in the high school or the community about ending this tracking structure, and no one seemed to see an equity issue. There are issues of skewed populations in honors and AP classes even at low achievement Oakland high schools, where Asian students are the typical high achievers. But there is nothing like an aggressively protective "elite" parent group opposing detracking policies. And for a school that is almost completely African-American, the situation is especially simple, with no racial or class dimensions.

In general, the appearance of group inequity is crucial for understanding the politics of the tracking discussion. Try this simple fantasy. Imagine schools mixed racially and by ethnicity, with the usual kinds of ability grouping in academic subjects, differentiated curricula, a small, vocational, shop program, honors and AP classes with prestige and advantage for college choice, and so on. But imagine that each class or program from the most elementary remedial math and "skills" English to AP calculus and honors American history showed a distribution by race and ethnicity matching closely that of the whole school population. For a really complete fantasy, add in social class and family income. Would there be the kind of emotional debate that characterizes community arguments in places like Berkeley, CA and Cambridge, MA, to pick two apt examples, and to which Walter Karp contributed in Harper's? My speculation is that there would not be much interest in the issue. There would be no serious question of class privilege or "cultural capital," no evident social inequity. I imagine most people would see my fantasy as one of true equality of opportunity, where somehow each individual competed on a level playing field, with the results attributable to merit.

The fantasy is just that. For reality, we can look at the tracking issue in an especially vivid scene, the real world of Berkeley High School. My story is anecdotal and subjective, admittedly; no systematic data collection, no surveys, no funded research team. I was there in a more ordinary but more personally extensive way. The story goes back almost a decade. I was for three years (during the time the "cultural capital" Harvard Educational Review study was done) on the faculty, as "librarian-teacher," teaching a lowest track biology course and an untracked economics course (economics is required in California). During these years and beyond I had my four children and stepchildren go through, before, during, and after the particular detracking reform in question. These kids spread over the whole range of tracks, from low track through general, honors, and AP. I also took on the job of "chairperson" for the "parent-teacher-student association"--which, however, included no teachers or students, and was mainly made up of the "elite" parents analyzed in the HER study).

During the period I'm describing, ninth grade English and history were merged into a detracked "core," despite the heated opposition noted in the HER study. A year after the "core" program began, the English department detracked the two levels of the tenth grade English course. The policy was decided and implemented from above, with teachers not formally part of the decision process. Some were enthusiastic supporters; most were either skeptical or articulately opposed. The professional sense of the skeptics and opponents reflected the common idea that teaching a large class in an academic subject is done better when the range of skills in the class is relatively narrow.

My prediction was that detracking done in this way would change very little in school culture, school experiences, or measured outcomes for students--and that what constrained both the scope and the effectiveness of detracking policies at Berkeley was not mainly parental opposition. Nor should parents and students in opposition be simply classified as elites looking to preserve privilege: non-elite parents and students and most teachers often support the basic tracking format, as the HER researchers confirm and try to explain.

A more critical barrier to deep change is institutional inertia. Critics of tracking and its effects often say that mixing students won't succeed in improving anything basic unless there is a quite radical restructuring of pedagogy and of the high school itself, perhaps in the direction of small subschools--"intentional communities" that would provide a context for realizing the egalitarian ideals behind detracking. But in the normal course of events, detracking happens in the traditional school format and structure. Let us consider that context, at Berkeley. (For simplicity and to focus on the issues, I describe the situation at the time of the detracking. Later in the essay I will give a short update.)

Berkeley High is the only public high school for the city. It is very large, now approximately 2700 students (down from 3300), of astonishing diversity. Many curricular classes as well as extracurricular activities happen in groups with a broad range of relative heterogeneity, including academic achievement levels. In the required ninth grade ethnic studies class; in PE classes and in electives in dance, drama, fine arts, photography, jewelry-making, and so on; in school clubs and the many sports teams; in the "leadership" dam and the tobacco prevention program, there is considerable mixing. Even in AP classes there are students from all the different ethnic and racial groups--in very skewed numbers, of course--and most academic activities have some heterogeneity.

A significant number of situations, beyond the straight academic, are also quite skewed or somewhat exclusive to one or another group, and usually this situation reflects broader cultural patterns. Some sports are hardly mixed: the women's basketball team, a major state power, is almost exclusively black, while the women's crew is almost exclusively white, the badminton team highly Asian, and lacrosse almost exclusively white and Asian. Teams competing in mock trials are almost exclusively white. These kinds of activities are of course voluntary, and no anti-tracking position calls for remedying skewed populations in voluntary activities.

Informal tracking goes on without objection in some major academic areas, too. For instance, in mathematics, a core "gatekeeper port," students enter the high school at varying levels, with the usual population distributions. There were issues, during the period discussed, about who went into which of three different math programs. Such academic arrangements change quite often, and no one proposes a single standard path, with students placed in classes randomly. Math students who pass the prerequisites, a quite skewed population, follow a path through precalculus to AP calculus. Science was untracked through the introductory ninth grade course. But there was no movement to untrack the main science program, with its various levels--e.g., four in biology, from Advanced Placement down to Biology 1, which counted for graduation credit but not for college. Certainly there was no suggestion that AP or "advanced" classes in chemistry, biology, physiology and anatomy, and physics should use random assignment to bring about heterogeneity. Nor are foreign languages part of the detracking discussion. Students chose their language, and were then placed by their levels of competence. There was no obvious ability grouping, as in special honors classes. An expressive Berkeley High item: Swahili is taught as an offering of the African American Studies department, and enrollment is almost entirely African American, but no one suggested that this was tracking, and had to be remedied.

So it comes down to the humanities, broadly speaking: literature, writing, history, and social studies. The Harvard Educational Review study I referred to earlier focuses on the controversial adoption, in the early 1990s, of a plan to create a heterogeneous ninth grade core for English and world history, in place of the traditional courses which were tracked into two ability grouped levels. Classes would be team taught, and with (temporary) special funding, class size would be capped at twenty. Backup skill classes would be provided for students who would need extra help.

The researchers' theory comes mainly in the form of quotations from Bourdieu, or from explicators of his work: particularly about elites' preservation of cultural capital and the way ideology mystifies. The Berkeley elite parents say they are liberal and integrationist and non-racist, but when they are opposed to detracking policies brought in by administrations with power (the use of power as the way reforms happen is noted by the HER study, but seems not worth a comment), they are really just trying to maintain for their children privileged elite positions. "Elite" is never defined but seems to mean highly educated, affluent, and somewhat involved with intellectual culture. There is no evidence offered that members of the elite or elites share political, social, ideological, or other views that might govern an educational philosophy. The idea is that anyone who opposes detracking does so to retain privilege, whatever else his or her life is about.

I would be more superficial and less certain of what the actors involved really wanted, and try to provide a very different way of understanding what went on at Berkeley High, leading to some general thoughts. To be sure, differentiated schooling has clearly contributed to a process of maintaining unequal results (and a legitimation of those results) correlated to class status, while also allowing some educational mobility through the tracked system for lower class youth. But there are dangers in slipping too easily from such analysis to the direct explanation of conscious or subconscious beliefs and intentions.

This point is crucial in understanding the emotional quality that debates on tracking take on in forums for parents and in school board meetings. School isn't the only place where people gather cultural capital, as the Bourdieuian analysts in the HER study would agree. The home is quite crucial. When I as a parent did lots of talking to my child, took him to museums, made sure he had stimulating summer programs and after-school programs like "kids' carpentry," went to movies and plays with him, and read to him a whole lot from an early age, I thought I was being a good parent, helping to nurture an active and inquiring intellect, and developing his capacities for critical reasoning and appreciation of various intellectual matters. But I could be challenged: didn't I realize that I was quite substantially increasing his cultural capital? Well, as we used to say in our less refined moments, "no shit, Dick Tracy." Of course, doing all those good parent things was increasing his cultural capital. And of course he would have advantages in academic motivation and achievement, hardly available to immigrant Chicanos and their children, who also went to Berkeley High but rarely showed up in the AP classes my son was in. But you'll just have to take my word for it: I did not do those things in order to maintain the privileged status of my family, such as it was, or to make sure my child retained and expanded that status. Or, to be less confident about my self-knowledge (shouldn't we all be, researchers included?), I suppose that my motives were rather mixed. How would we weigh the various mixed motivations and make one the determining or the essential one?

To connect this general point to the Berkeley High description: my son didn't find the mixed core class very challenging, though he appreciated how good the teacher committed to detracking was. But I am realistic about cultural capital, as were most other elite parents at Berkeley High. There was no mass defection on the part of high-status educated parents. A class or two that wasn't quite as good academically as the not-so-great, old, two-track, ninth grade history and English classes would hardly define the overall four-year experience at Berkeley High. The long list of elite college acceptances printed in each graduation issue of the school paper--"congratulations: you're out of Berkeley High and into college"--is a measure of the school's continuing ability to serve the higher status families whose concern with college admission is of course quite profound. But simply labeling the situation a scene where parents unfairly amass cultural capital to maintain privilege seems to me crude, simplistic, and basically not explanatory.

My judgment is that the ninth grade, mixed, core classes did not significantly improve academic outcomes for non-privileged students. On all of the major markers, like Ds and Fs in major subjects (where the range was from about 70 percent for African-American and Latino students down to 20 percent for white students), the "attrition" between entry and graduation, and membership in AP classes, there has been no significant change in the years since the policy was implemented. Whether the classes themselves were less academically demanding than were those in the higher of the two traditional English and history tracks is difficult to judge, since teachers have fairly wide freedom as to how the class is run, the amount and level of materials used, the amount of writing and reading assigned, and so on. Whether the increased mixing of groups because of heterogeneity led to more group "integration" could not be demonstrated. Were there some minority students who were able to be in AP classes, who would not have done so in the old tracked system? Were there academically alienated students who found the greater demands of non-tracked courses even more unpleasant than demands in tracked classes? Possibly. I don't think there are clear answers, for Berkeley High or for the set of all regular high schools.

To return to the limited scope of detracking at Berkeley High: math, science, and foreign languages had never been much involved in the debates. History classes in post-freshman years had not been officially tracked in the past. But Berkeley High students practiced "self-scheduling." So students chose (not everyone got their choices, of course) American History sections, using grapevine knowledge of the different teachers, including how demanding they were. The results were some unofficial "honors" classes, with the usual skewed populations.

The last official tracking in the humanities took place in English, where there were two levels each in second- and third-year English. The sophomore course tracks were World Literature (the higher level) and Multicultural Literature (the lower), to which the English department assigned students on the basis of skills evaluated by counselors. The skewed populations were as expected, though there was considerable mixing within each course by race and ethnicity. There were no resources to provide the support that the ninth grade core received for a while. The department policy was to choose a book or play that all sections of a course would read. Otherwise different teachers did their own thing, as is normally the case, a fact that all high school students come to realize. Pressure to end this tracking came from the administration's and school board's detracking policy, which gained force from the demands of accrediting agencies. (Again, detracking is the establishment position, not just the Gramscian-Bourdieuian one held by left-liberal, equity-seeking, education professors and written up for the Harvard Educational Review).

I noted my expectation (confirmed in recent years) that formal detracking would not have a serious effect on the relevant measures of school achievement. To see why, it will be useful now to move away from measures like grades, scores on skills tests, and D and F rates, and to look instead at the phenomenology of classroom life for a more concrete sense of how, in the standard format of the comprehensive high school, detracking is expected to achieve its goals. In sophomore English, detracking meant that there would be only one group with departmental set texts: a Shakespeare play and a "world lit" novel that will be used in all sections. In the old system, fewer than 20 percent of tenth graders were in the lower track; one should not assume that the tracking always means a small, elite group in the higher track with the "masses" relegated to a lower track. In the detracked structure, students who would have been in the Multicultural Literature track are distributed among the various World Literature sections. It is obvious that almost all teachers will teach very much as they did before. There is sensitivity about "lowering standards," which I do not immediately interpret as a covert Bourdieuian ploy to maintain unjust privilege. But more critically: teachers will not generally have the time, experience, or support to develop the radically changed classroom procedures that reformers say are needed to make newly untracked classes successful for all.

Furthermore, teachers of the old, upper-track classes already had a wide range of students, with a significant number who didn't do well academically, got D's and Fs, and didn't respond positively to exhortations to do homework, or come prepared, or take part in class activities with vigor. If all detracked classes were to become heterogeneous, this "failing" part of the distribution would presumably be larger. Issues of classroom control, class participation, atmosphere, and so on--the culture of the classroom--might then be more troublesome. But as teachers know well, the chemistry of classes varies widely, anyway, and it is unlikely that the somewhat changed distribution of ability levels would lead to major changes in class culture.

The vision of what detracking is supposed to accomplish includes the belief that when low-track students enter heterogeneous classes, they will be inspired by the higher expectations of teachers, the stimulation of academically skilled classmates, even the challenge of greater difficulty in the materials studied. Anecdotes offered in support of this idea, true as they might be, do not come near confirming the vision. (I could easily collect more anecdotes on the other side.) Another suggestion for explaining poor results in low tracks is that younger, less experienced, and less qualified teachers are more likely to be teaching the lower track classes. This is certainly an important point for consideration, but the meaning of such a statistical finding in any specific context is not settled. At Berkeley High, I observed teachers of the lower tracks as committed and caring in similar proportions as teachers on higher tracks. In fact--an admittedly subjective point--the younger and newer teachers in lower track dames were often less jaded and cynical about the lower track students and more energetic and experimental. Since many students in all tracks have alienated attitudes, and since their classroom experiences will not change much, I am skeptical that detracking will have strong effects of the sort heralded in the literature.

An important aspect of the detracking debate's politics is that it does not effectively raise questions about the structure and culture of the high school: the organization of the school day, the Carnegie unit approach to establishing graduation requirements, the departmental domination of teacher organization within the school, and so on. The tracking discussion is isolated from other reform discussions, though there are important connections. Two examples are proposals for small "schools within schools," and "academy" programs that connect academic and vocational approaches, as described in the first installment of this essay. The only clear political focus of detracking reform is the mix of students in classes.

An illuminating account that adds to the anecdotal weight of my limited case study comes from James Rosenbaum, professor of sociology, education, and social policy at Northwestern. Obviously "progressive," politically and pedagogically, Rosenbaum published a statistically and methodologically sophisticated study in 1976, Making Inequality: The Hidden Curriculum of High School Tracking. Some twenty years later, he revisited the issue through a study of a single high school that seemed to have transcended the opposition to tracking issues and entered the detracking project with solid support from faculty, administration, and community. Rosenbaum chronicled the clear failure of the project to achieve its admirable goals and the serous problems that resulted, in a popular exposition that appeared in American Educator, Winter 1999-2000, "If Tracking Is Bad, Is Detracking Better?"

My account of what happened at Berkeley High points to a tension between the detracking ideal and the core functions of a diverse, comprehensive, public high school: to serve the entire constituency of its town, city, or region, and to elicit a positive commitment from all or almost all the subgroups of the community, elite and otherwise. It cannot play this role unless there are various ways of getting through high school. At the same time, because of (justified) equity concerns, it is politically and morally necessary for school leaders and school board candidates to acknowledge and do something about past injustices, through detracking and other equity-relevant policies. Even if many parents dislike such reforms, and even if many teachers support tracking for pedagogical reasons, detracking may be mandated and implemented in one form or another.

But in the actual school process, I have argued, there will be ways for highly motivated students with high career aspirations, aiming for admission to prestigious colleges as a key step, to get what they need for their purposes. For example, there are upper year electives that fulfill requirements, and there are some academically high level classes whose populations have consistently been skewed by voluntary tracking; but there is no move to use policy to "detrack" these electives. There will also be ways for the much wider range of less academically skilled young people with more constrained ambitions to achieve in substantial numbers the basic high school goal--the diploma--and entry to some level of higher education aside from the elite college path. The reasons for unequal access to cultural capital--the differential contribution of home and community environments, most obviously--connect essentially to the causes and functions of inequality in capitalist societies (and also, back then, in communist societies, as studies of university attendance in the Soviet Union show). Carrying out basic desired functions will result in skewed distribution of markers like measured skills, grades, and college admissions. So even when tracking is abolished as an official practice to express the ideal of eliminating the "achievement gap," it will continue in other ways.

There are ways of transcending this whole dilemma that are consistent with the aims of progressive education. One is the "new vocationalism" described in the first part of this essay. Small programs, chosen by students, proceeding through a wide range of learning situations, including work in the "real world," avoid the comprehensive high school format, standard classroom methods, and required, standardized academic curriculum set by state or federal authorities. I don't mean, of course, that such programs will eliminate all achievement gaps. There will still be a fairly wide range of quality and depth in individual learning. I do mean that the programs will express the classical progressive idea of varied experience, with student choices and interests respected--which ideally makes for commitment and serious engagement at whatever academic skill level an individual will be on. So tracking will dissolve as a salient issue, though not because students will all be in standardized, detracked, regular classes.

To update the Berkeley High situation: it turns out that my predictions have been confirmed. The discussion of the "achievement gap" continues because disadvantaged students have not shown significant gains on relevant indices of results. There is no ongoing administrative push to extend the detracking moves of a decade ago to the standard tracked math and science programs, and, in a move in the contrary direction, AP classes (which always stay outside of the detracking debate) have been added in history and American government.

Actually, more interesting than these expected results is the direction structural reform has taken in response to problems that tracking raises. After years of discussion about creating "small schools"--I noted this idea earlier and in detail in the first part of this essay--a policy reflecting the initiative of groups of teachers (hacked by the new principal and by the superintendent) has been adopted. Over a three-year period, it is expected that half of the student body will be choosing one of a growing number of diverse "small schools." Since I was an active initiator of the discussion of this idea more than a decade ago (reform takes time), I feel encouraged. The small school format typically is untracked from the beginning, on principle and for practical reasons of size. The flexible and more personal culture of many of these intentional communities opens up many ways to address the wide range of academic skill levels, and goes beyond simply mixing students in traditional class formats and curricula. The basic problems are by no means solved, as even the most fervent advocates of this reform will admit. But it does undercut the dominant structure of tracked classes in each subject.

So by considering in these two essays the related issues of vocational education and detracking, I arrive at what seems to be an old and traditional position, but in terms that rise out of the progressive vision. The comprehensive high school has the power that comes with being part of almost everyone's experience, with the force of familiarity and tradition--the sense that "this is what a real high school is like"--carrying out the functions of sorting, selection, reproduction of class relations, and legitimation through an appearance of mobility. In such schools the command of government to abolish any "unfair" inequity of achievement will have no serious effect, just as the solemn commitment of two presidents all the governors in the "Goals 2000" farce showed no results--a predictable outcome that seemed too boring for the media to even notice. The commands of the "No Child Left Behind" act about steady improvement and elimination of any group achievement differences will have about as powerful an impact as "Goals 2000." (Note: for a clear and convincing explication of the basic fallacies underlying the politically-inspired rhetoric of this "reform by test-based threats and sanctions," see Richard Elmore's terse and biting essay "Unwarranted Intrusion," in Education Next: A Journal of Opinion and Research, June 2003).

The situation for those of us in the conceptual and political tradition represented by John Dewey is pretty much what Dewey himself faced. There will be opportunities to make the kinds of critique that he voiced so well, decades ago. And there will be occasional opportunities to create truly inspiring programs that can show impressive success with a wide range of young people. These models will be given publicity and will appeal to an unknown but significant number of teachers and parents and students who will try to do something in their own communities. There will be no chance to bring about major changes from the top down: support for these visions is a minority position, as it was during the entire history of progressive education. The political and social arrangements of a society do most to shape opportunity in education and the labor force, and neither political nor educational progressives have ever had major institutional power, no more in past eras than today. Dewey and other progressive educators were clearly on soft ground in suggesting that the schools themselves could do a lot to bring about the major changes in work and community life needed to reach the ideal of a democratic, egalitarian social world.

So progressive educators working in schools and related institutions have much the same constraints and the same opportunities they have had historically. Will the force of creative examples bring about big changes? Not in the short run, obviously. But this anarchist paradigm seems unavoidable, from the days when Dewey started his little "lab school" at the University of Chicago to the kinds of lovely model that I described in the last issue of Radical Teacher. It would be more satisfying to finish with a broad, promising, politically oriented strategy for institutional change. But short of utopia, it seems that now as in the past the progressive idea will encourage efforts for serious school change through the collective impact of many small models, keeping alive the old vision in times like the present when testing and threats to teachers and students are touted by politicians and their educational ideologues, almost everywhere and across the whole political spectrum.

NOTES:

(1) The report in question was done by Harvard Kennedy School professor Tom Loveless: "The Tracking and Ability Grouping Debate," issued by a conservative think tank, the Thomas Fordham Foundation. (Fordham Report, Vol. 2, No. 8; August 1998)

(2) It is reprinted in his Buried Alive: Essays on Our Endangered Republic (Franklin Square Press, 1992).

(3) Amy Stuart Wells and Irene Serna, "The Politics of Culture: Understanding Local Political Resistance to Detracking in Racially Mixed Schools," Harvard Educational Review, Spring 1996. Note: Berkeley High is one of the schools studied, under the pseudonym "Liberty High."