Nancy Breard, assistant director of graduate studies at Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C., is not an advocate of tracking but she supports ability grouping.
"Tracking is when you label a student and it never changes," said Breard, who heads a program that trains teachers to teach gifted students. "Ability grouping is more flexible, and it has to do with performance. It can be done within classrooms. But teachers continue to look at students and they are placed where they need to he. In some schools that happens and in some schools it does not. We know there are abuses."
Those abuses concerns Karen Watson of Sylvania, Ga., a small rural community sixty miles northwest of Savannah. Watson is coordinator of the Positive Action Committee. In 1995, the community group's opposition to tracking led to a federal order to end tracking in the Screven County School District.
"Ability grouping eventually leads to tracking," Watson said. "We aren't going to find many systems that are going to be able to separate the two. That is part of the problem. Society still carries the baggage of classism and racism and that baggage will flow into the school system.
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