[Ohiogift] Study/blog on Skill-based sorting

[Margaret DeLacy]

Friends:

Below is a link to an Education Week blog and a link to the underlying study with a link to that also.


"Devil is in the Details when it comes to Tracking/Untracking" by Holly Yettick for the Inside School Research blog of Education Week, March 21, 2014 

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/inside-school-research/2014/03/algebra_for_all.html?cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS3 

[Margaret's comment] This is a discussion of a study "Skill-based Sorting in an Era  of College Prep for All". See below for a link to the study.  The blog concludes that detracking for math can work when struggling students receive additional support AND teachers are consulted.  Oddly, the blog assumes that this is evidence against tracking.  In fact, my reading of the brief suggests that tracking was a better policy, although the study itself concludes that there were both benefits and problems.  

Put together, the studies included more than 150,000 Chicago students.

"Skill-based Sorting in an Era  of College Prep for All"  http://ccsr.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Sorting%20Brief_0.pdf  A research review by the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research, March 2014.  

[Margaret's comment] This brief summarizes the results of ten separate studies of Chicago's "Algebra for All", Double dose Algebra and College Prep for All.  Not surpisingly, the study finds that results are mixed: the authors found that how schools sort students is as important as the content students are exposed to. 

The biggest downside they found was that grades for students in the highest math group fell after tracking resumed even though average test scores rose.  The authors think that this is because teachers tend to grade on a curve. 

 Because grades are associated with college success, they concluded that this was a problem.  I do not think that conclusion is warranted for most students.  It may, however, be a problem for a small number of students who are barely qualified for a given class and receive a very low grade. 

This is a short and readable brief.  I recommend that you read it yourselves, and share it with school administrators too. 

Below are some of the more striking conclusions: 

--"Average test scores are higher when classes are sorted by skills due to large benefits for high-skilled students’ learning gains". ... 

--"the effects of mixing students together with the same college-preparatory curriculum are mostly negative. The policy led low-skilled students to take higher-level math, science, and English classes with higher-skilled peers than before the policy, while lowering the average skill level in the classes taken by high-skilled students. Low-skilled students became more likely to fail their ninth-grade classes after being put into college-prep classes with higher-skilled peers, rather than taking remedial classes with lower-skilled peers. After four years, they were less likely to graduate from high school than students who began high school with similar skills before the policy. They were not more likely to go to college. Students with high skills were less likely to take very high levels of math and science after the policy, and they were less likely to go to college   than students who had entered high school with similar skills before the policy...."

--"A universal curriculum with unsorted class-rooms can increase, rather than diminish, inequities by race and income if teachers are unable to differentiate instruction and maintain classroom control...."

--"Those low-income minority students with the most potential to succeed in college were less likely to get a strong instructional environment when the curriculum was detracked, accentuating differences in opportunities between suburban schools where high-skilled students often are in classrooms with other high-skilled peers...." 


Margaret