The push to eliminate honors programs in schools

In an effort to reduce inequality in education outcomes, some school districts are removing honors classes or other programs for high achievers. Some students, parents and teachers say the push to "de-track" or "de-level" classrooms is limiting learning for everyone.

Carol Corbett Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education. Author of "Detracking for Excellence and Equity."

Scott Peters, director of research consulting at NWEA, an education research organization focused on improving education systems. Previously an education professor for 13 years at the University of Wisconsin – Whitewater.

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Palo Alto, California. It boasts one of the top performing public school districts in the country. It's ranked as the best school district in all of California by the education website Niche, and it placed eighth nationally based on test scores, graduation rates, parent reviews, and other factors.

Of course, Palo Alto is also the home of Stanford University, founders of giant Silicon Valley companies, professors, diplomats, computer scientists, you name it. But reformers in the district say that Palo Alto's public schools, in fact, are a perfect mirror of the community, and they say that's a problem.

LIZ BRIMHALL: Our honors classes look very different than our college prep level classes, and as educators, that is a deep concern that we all share.

CHAKRABARTI: That's Liz Brimhall, a biology teacher at Palo Alto High School. She was speaking at a school board meeting at the beginning of this year. The problem she and others say is a pattern of what some call inequitable outcomes in education.

A low income Black or Latino student in the Palo Alto District is more likely to get below a C grade in a class, face a disciplinary issue, or fail at state standardized tests for math according to a district report. Now at the January school board meeting, Brimhall zeroed in on a specific practice at high schools.

Students are grouped in classes by ability. You heard her mention the levels before, honors and college prep.

Having taught for so many years, it is really heartbreaking to see a student who just because in their ninth-grade year weren't quite ready for an honors level, feel like they're a failure in science and get turned off from science.

And then the flip side is also terrible. A student that you see obviously could have been challenged, doesn't go there for whatever reason. What they think about, their selves, what they see as the community perception, those are all really sad things to see.

CHARKABARTI: So Brimhall advocated abolishing different levels in classes, in some of the courses in the high school.

Put all students in one unified course, she said, instead. And here's the thing, every science teacher in the district agreed with her. Brimhall said advanced courses in chemistry and physics would still be offered for students later in their high school careers. And moreover, she said she does not think mixed level classes would hold back more advanced students.

The transition year to high school, it's hard to actually know what you're getting into. And so this foundational course where it's all one lane, we hope it can really give everyone what they need, then continue on make informed decisions and keep going.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, Palo Alto's Science teachers may have agreed with Brimhall, but students and parents did not.

Multiple eighth grade students rose to speak at the school board meeting. Arielle Dror and Katie Hu said they had been excited for honors biology.

ARIELLE: I'm really excited about classes that move faster and challenge me. Seeing as these past three years at Greene Middle School, the science classes have been really slow and frankly, a little bit boring.

KATIE: I know that a lot of my friends feel the same way. I'm currently taking Geometry Honors, a class that I am really being challenged in and feel that is right for me. And next year I would like to be able to take a science honor class that actually challenges me, keep biology honors. Thank you.

CHAKRABARTI: Parents Shan Sinha and Lan Guo were concerned about high achievers being held back from advancing faster, despite what teachers were saying.

The decision to remove biology lanes defies common sense. It takes a system that offers students agency and opportunity to self-select into student cohorts who match their passions and skills, replacing it with a one size fits none approach.

If we want to make the education equitable, we should provide different lanes suitable for different students, not forcing advanced students go down the lane or vice versa.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, the public comment went on, but it eventually closed. Palo Alto Unified School District's school committee took a vote with many decision makers seeming physically uncomfortable in their chairs.

However, by a three to two margin, the school board voted to eliminate honors biology in the high school curriculum. Now, that was back in January. But the issue has not died down. In fact, recently it caught the attention of Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna, the self-identified leading Progressive also happens to represent Palo Alto and Silicon Valley.

He took to x slash Twitter to express his profound disagreement with progressive educators.

RO KHANNA: They call this de-laning. I call it an assault on excellence. Look, I took a lot of honors classes at public school, at Council Rock High School in Pennsylvania.  We need to bring students up, not tear high performing students down.

CHAKRABARTI: Palo Alto district Superintendent Don Austin, said at another public meeting this month that he feels Congressman Khanna is unfairly targeting his colleagues, especially considering how successful the Palo Alto School District is overall.

DON AUSTIN: He did make a comment, and I think he was speaking more about nationally his thoughts about the education system and places where he thought that it was going in a wrong direction. Unfortunately, as a representative of our state of California, he is a United States Congressman. I think people, and I will include myself, were offended by his comments and thought that it was unnecessary and misguided to point at Palo Alto and his example.

CHAKRABARTI: Maybe that's because Congressman Khanna could have picked a lot of other places because the "de-tracking" or "de-laning" movement is not limited to Palo Alto, California. It has spread across the country, particularly in blue states, from Rhode Island to Michigan to Oregon and more. But the question now is, has this movement achieved its goals?

Those more equitable outcomes for students. And what exactly does that mean, concretely, or does doing things like removing honors options from high school penalize every student advanced or not advanced by removing the opportunity to engage with the most challenging schoolwork they can. So we're gonna have that conversation, that debate today and joining me now is Carol Corbett Burris.

She's the executive director of the Network for Public Education and served as principal of Southside High School in Rockville Centre, New York from 2000 to 2015. And she's author of Detracking for Excellence and Equity, and On the Same Track: How Schools Can Join the Twenty-First-Century Struggle against Resegregation.

Carol Corbett Burris, welcome to On Point.

CAROL CORBETT BURRIS: Thank you so much for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: Also with us today is Scott Peters. He's director of research and consulting at the NWEA. A nonprofit organization focused on improving education systems. Prior to that, he was an education professor for 13 years at the University of Wisconsin--Whitewater, and he joins us today from Wisconsin Public Radio in Madison.

Scott Peters, welcome.

SCOTT PETERS: Hello, Meghna. Hello, Carol.

CHARKABARTI: Carol Corbett Burris, let me just start with you. What exactly is the problem that de-tracking or de-laning is trying to solve?

CORBETT BURRIS: A lot of it has to do with equity and making sure that all students, regardless of their race, regardless of their ability, regardless of their socioeconomic status, has an opportunity to excel.

And we found that was absolutely a problem in Rockville Centre where you could walk through the school and you could guess the track by the kids who were sitting in the class. And so what we decided to do was we decided to let one very simple principle guide us and that was the curriculum for the best, should be the best curriculum for all.

And so we didn't abolish honors classes. What we did instead was very carefully over time while providing support, put all students in an honors class and we had remarkable results.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. I wanna come back to that, the example of your experience as a principal in just a second. But Scott Peters.

What's your response to, as Carol has said, the overall thrust of de-tracking de-laning, whatever you wanna call it, as a means by which to provide all students an opportunity to excel.

PETERS: I think it's a great effort and I think it's certainly laudable and an important goal to try to make sure that 100% of the students who are ready for a particular learning opportunity, whether it's biology or algebra, and depending on the grade, that we want all the students who are ready for that opportunity to learn it.

We want all students to be challenged. I think that's unquestionable and unobjectionable. I think the challenge is just more figuring out which students are ready and which still need more support, and when we are going to enroll, say students universally, so 100% of eighth graders in an honors class, 100% of ninth graders in a biology class, making sure that we as an education system are providing the supports necessary for students to be successful because it's very easy.

I shouldn't say easy. That's doing a disservice to all the hard work Carol has done, but it's easier to simply enroll all students in a class and then be done. It's much harder to enroll all the students and make sure that we're doing justice to the skills they bring to the classroom, and that they're prepared for success.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So Carol, let's dive into your example at Rockville Centre a little bit more. The first year that the school embarked on this de-tracking de-laning project. What did that first year look like? What were the key changes that you made?

CORBETT BURRIS: First of all, we started at the middle school level.

And we reduced the number of tracks until all students were in the same class with all students taking algebra in the eighth grade. And then we started to move that reform into the high school, and we did it in a very thoughtful way. We took as the basis our honors curriculum, and that was the curriculum we worked with because we knew that if high achieving students and high achieving families felt as though their children were losing, we were not going to have success, nor did we want to hold anyone back.

So we made a real commitment then to do a few things. One, excellent staff development, teaching teachers how to differentiate instruction, providing support classes for students who struggled so that while they would be in the heterogeneous class, they would also have another period every other day of support where the teacher could pre-teach.

Or they could post teach some of the concepts in the class. We provided extra help in the mornings and we made sure that the kids that needed that extra help got into extra help before the school day began. So it was a real commitment on the part of the district. Did we meet with parental resistance?

Absolutely. We did, and some of the comments were frankly embarrassingly atrocious statements like some kids are meant to work in the mail room. And I thought this was the year, Carol, that you were going to weed those kids out. You start to hit in the beginning a lot of resistance based really on prejudice.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Scott, let me just immediately ask you a question, and Carol, I wanna hear more about what you did in just a second. But from what Carol described before the break, Scott it sounds like thoughtfully and slowly what she did in Rockville Centre, New York is essentially all the right things, right?

Instead of using this sort of amalgam of different leveled curricula in a class, they use the honors level curriculum as the heart of the classes that were kids of the same level, or, sorry, of different levels were in. She took time to do some staff development. I know that's always something that teachers request when major curriculum changes are made.

And critically, they offered support classes, more tutoring, I'd say, and opportunities for kids to get extra assistance if they needed it. These are all good things and there's a lot of research to show that especially the tutoring is key to success. But to be frank, I feel like Carol's example is the exception. Because what I've been reading and hearing and researching from districts across the country is what happens is more along the lines of what you said.

Everyone's thrown into the same level, and you call it a day.

PETERS: Yes, and I think that's the challenge. I'm really glad we're starting with kind of Carol's example, because it is such a good one of when it can be successful and when it can work. The challenge is not necessarily how high or advanced or how low the curriculum is.

We all want students to be able to do really hard things and to learn advanced skills for success in life. The problem is that students are extremely diverse. They're diverse in many ways. The way we're talking about today is in terms of the skills that they bring to the classroom and the prior content mastery that they bring on the first day of school.

The typical classroom nationwide has roughly five grade levels of proficiency within it. So if you think of a middle school classroom, sixth grade classroom, you have students in it that are already algebra proficient. You also have students that are probably not quite proficient, according to third or fourth grade standards.

So raising the bar is great, but the problem is the stretch, is the range. And a really outstanding educator, a really passionate educator with lots of resources and lots of additional supports like tutoring can challenge a really big part of that range. But this is not a knock against teachers at all.

I was a teacher, the challenge is that when you have students that have such a wide range of learning needs, it's really difficult to be everything to everyone. And if the intervention of de-tracking just takes the form of saying, okay, we're getting rid of the regular eighth grade math class or the non-honors class, and instead putting everyone in the honors class.

But then we don't provide those supports. We don't provide the training, and everyone just keeps proceeding as they were before, where they're teaching the same content. Then we're not meeting students where they are. At either end of the spectrum, we're not challenging advanced learners and we're not helping students who haven't had as many opportunities to catch up.

So those really are the keys to success. But they take a lot of energy. They take a lot of time, they take a lot of expertise, and schools are very stretched as it is.

CHAKRABARTI: Carol, how did you accomplish this? Because it seems that there's actually a bit of a conflict in here, and help me resolve it, that the core curriculum was the honors level curriculum, but you still differentiated instruction within classes.

Like how do those two things work together?

CORBETT BURRIS: Yeah, a lot of training. Differentiated instruction with teachers is really just giving them skills in terms of the questions they ask, whether there is even, for example, a second teacher in the classroom, which is also very helpful. And that's not in all classes.

That was also part of our special education inclusion program. So we had eliminated self-contained special education classes, except for students who were developmentally delayed. And so very often, a lot of our classes had a second teacher in it or a teaching assistant in it. That was key. And it was very helpful.

I think there's just this supposition that if there's a lot of different reading levels or a lot of different levels of math proficiency that somehow this can't work. It can work. The fact that the teachers in Palo Alto are saying, We can do this, I think is absolutely remarkable. And before the break, we started to talk about parent resistance a little bit.

I will tell you, that at the end of that first year, the same parents that were giving me a hard time, that were very skeptical, were actually fans of what we did. That was extremely gratifying.

And it was a community not that different than Palo Alto.

CHAKRABARTI: No, I take your point.

The teachers in Palo Alto are saying, we can do this, but in other places in this country where the same experiment has been done, teachers who, some teachers who are initially very supportive of it have subsequently become very concerned about the challenges that come with teaching in a de-leveled classroom and we heard from Gail, for example. She is a teacher in Belgrade Lakes, Maine, and her school has mixed academics, academic levels together in subjects like English, math, and science.

GAIL: It's an unmitigated disaster. Teachers cannot be effective when students who barely read are in class with those far ahead in ability, high level students are bored, low achievers are frustrated.

I'm near retirement age and I'm shocked at the dysfunction of much of the educational system in this country. We continually go backward.

CHAKRABARTI: Carol, will you respond to that?

CORBETT BURRIS: I just fundamentally disagree. From my life experience, from the life experience of our teachers, who would push us to move to the next grade level, that really wasn't the case.

I think because there is one teacher who is discontented in the school, it's saying it's a disaster. I don't know that it's necessarily the kind of disaster that she describes. Now, if every teacher in the school were saying the same thing, I think then definitely the district has to take a look at the program and see what they can do to better support their teachers and more importantly, better support their students.

CHAKRABARTI: But there are districts where every teacher, or almost every teacher is saying this. Full disclosure, I live in Massachusetts, and this is a hot topic here in Massachusetts. And one district in particular, Newton, Massachusetts, just late last year, this year, the teachers began to speak out about how challenging it is to teach multi-level classes.

They call it a huge problem that it's actually not serving all of their students equitably. And in fact, they were most concerned that the very students the experiment was intended to help are the ones who are getting the least out of it. That it's not achieving equity at all. And there was a huge number of teachers who started voicing this in a school district that, at least in Massachusetts, is known to be very top tier.

So it's not just like one anecdote in occasional classrooms, Carol.

CORBETT BURRIS: It may not be one anecdote in occasional classrooms, and I see you're bringing your life experience.

CHAKRABARTI: I don't live in Newton, but I live in Massachusetts.

Yeah.

CORBETT BURRIS: Yeah. I did some staff development work in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I believe it was pretty successful. The de-tracking reform there. Look, without being inside the school, without seeing how they are putting the reform in place, it's very difficult to come to a judgment. All I can tell you is that in our district, in our high school, as well as in other schools that I worked with, it's been a success.

CHAKRABARTI: So Scott Peters, this is a challenge that I find frequently as a person who's, I'm not an education professional, I'm just someone who's trying to understand it as well as I possibly can. That a lot of the judgments on success or failure of any kind of education initiative can be very anecdote based, but there has to be some kind of data to go along with this.

We do testing, right? We know about grades, we know about college acceptance rates, or college graduation rates, et cetera. So are there data that exists to either support the success of de-leveling or to question it?

PETERS: Naturally, because I'm a recovering professor, I'm going to say that's a very nuanced answer to the question and could go on for a long time about it.

But I'll be as brief as possible, which is, the term tracking isn't terribly helpful. It's not really a great proper noun. Most of the studies that look at these various interventions look at specific types of what we call, may call de-tracking, so universal eighth grade algebra or getting rid of an honors section or something like that.

And there's quite a bit of mixed results around these studies, I think because of a lot of what Carol is describing. Because if you look at a broad study, even one that's been truly random assignments, you know the kind of the gold standard of research, you'll see some students that do very well, who were not placed before.

They excel, they score higher, they take more advanced classes. Later they enroll in college at higher rates. But then you also see some that don't. And the key factor of why is often a lot of these things that are going on that Carol's describing, these additional services that weren't necessarily captured in this study.

So for something like eighth grade algebra. Just to key in on a key example right here, where there's been a lot of different studies on this. There are absolutely studies that have shown that under universal eighth grade algebra kind of interventions, more students have benefited, and it's been disproportionately students of color and students who are not normally placed in such an advanced class.

The problem is it's still not everybody. So right now, if you think we have roughly in the area of 25% of eighth graders taking algebra, some of the research I've done and some of my colleagues says that probably somewhere in the area of 30% to 50% of students are ready for algebra, regardless of the extra tutoring and supports we provide.

But that's still other students that if placed in eighth grade algebra, would need extra tutoring and extra support. So it's absolutely more students. That would benefit from these advanced learning opportunities then are receiving them now. I just don't think it's 100% of students, unless we're really gonna provide a lot of extra supports to the students who haven't had the opportunity to learn those prerequisite skills yet.

CHAKRABARTI: And to be clear, that's exactly what Carol did, right? In her district.

PETERS: Absolutely.

CHAKRABARTI: Carol, lemme come back to you. How many years do you think it took to really implement this whole new system and did it cost the district extra? Because that is like one of the number one factors, I think, that goes to preventing the key extra supports from being put in place that Scott was talking about.

CORBETT BURRIS: Yeah, absolutely. So let's just focus then on Algebra for all in the eighth grade. First, it started in sixth grade because you don't suddenly all of a sudden in the eighth grade say, okay, everybody, now you're going to be together and you are all going to be taking algebra. So first the sixth grade was de-track, then the seventh grade and then the eighth grade.

And what the district did, which I think was very smart, was it very carefully, and we continue this in the high school, looked at the results at the end of the year. Were more students failing the class. Were scores going down. And what we found, and we were surprised, happily surprised to find was that just the opposite was happening.

The failure rate of students actually went down. It did not go up. And as we did it, the support classes were also put in place. Then we moved to the high school so that all of the students were then taking geometry. And part of the reason why we did it was, there was also at the time, a lot of good literature. Because we looked at the literature continually, that showed that students whose parents never attended college more than doubled their chances of enrolling in a four-year college if they took high school math courses beyond Algebra 2.

That was a big deal for us getting all of the kids, maybe they didn't go on to AP Calculus and they had already met their math credits. They stopped taking math or they took an elective. But at least getting them to that algebra two because it just is a key to college success.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. But can I just quickly jump in when we were able to do it?

Yeah. The cost issue, did it cost the district more?

CORBETT BURRIS: It cost a little bit more, but not as much as you would think, because what happens when you have various tracks is that you tend to have uneven class sizes, right? So very often if it's a low track class, you're trying to keep the enrollment in the class lower.

Because you have so many high need students in the class, you have more discipline issues in the class, and then you always have a cut point, right? Like you say, okay, I don't want more than 30 students in a class. Here's 31, we're opening up another class. So we found that we had, that we were able to run fewer sections when we de-track.

But yes. There was some additional course. Though not overwhelming.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah.

So I keep coming, Scott, I keep coming back to the fact that Carol's example is terrific because it's so well thought out and so different from so many of the other examples  that we've thought about across the country and namely be one of the other things which she just raised is they started in sixth grade.

With this de-tracking program, which is completely the opposite of what's happening in some other districts, when they're just like looking at the high school, which is, I think, where the levels become most stark and we're just gonna de-track the high school, take care of the problem that way.

It's a really different endeavor there because some of the levels, if I can just put it that way, are already like, baked into a student's experience of school. And to that point, I just want to go back to again bringing up this example.

Because it was just recent and it did make national news, in Newton, Massachusetts, where a teacher, Ryan Normandin, he actually wrote about this. Because he and his fellow STEM faculty at one of the high schools were so concerned about poorer outcomes in de-leveled classes, that they did an internal survey.

They tried to collect their own data and they found out that classes where students would usually be in quote-unquote college prep, so it's not the advanced level, when they were all put together in single level classes, they actually performed worse, right?

So the outcomes for kids when they were in just a college prep level class, only, were better then there are counterparts in every single assessment, including the final exam. And so I just think like in school districts that are experiencing something like that, what's going wrong?

PETERS: Yeah, I mean I think the best example or to think about this is to make it concrete about math again, is to imagine a sixth-grade class and you have some students, and this is true nationally, this is not true about some kind of strange outlier school. But you have these students who are starting sixth grade, and they are already algebra proficient.

There's not a lot of them, but they absolutely exist. Then you also have students who are starting sixth grade math, and they are still working on two-digit edition. So we have this really wide range of readiness.

As I think we've reiterated, it's really hard to teach such a diverse range of needs, and so the reason why some students still struggle when we do a heterogeneous grouping mainstream is the teacher is teaching to some kind of core curriculum.

Whether it's the advanced curriculum, whether it's our below grade level curriculum, whether it's grade level, they're teaching to some kind of core and then trying to differentiate. But the challenge is that students have just such a wide range of needs and we're only talking academically. We, of course, there's many other types of needs, students that are still learning English, students have social, emotional, behavioral needs.

There's a lot of things going on in the classroom, and it's just hard for one teacher to be everything to everybody. We have a very diverse country where, you know, just because you are 10 years old does not mean you have had the same learning opportunities. And so the programs that are the most successful are those that build students up over the long term.

There's a great example I like to talk about in Evanston, Illinois, where they had this goal of having more students take eighth grade Algebra and they built students up from third grade. That's how far back they started.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Today we are talking about the movement to de-track or de-lane in America's public schools. And I want to return to California as an example for just a moment. Because in 2014, the San Francisco Unified School District adopted a pretty controversial de-track curriculum there that eliminated accelerated math classes for middle and high schoolers, particularly high schoolers in ninth and 10th grade.

Patrick Wolff is a parent of multiple children who attended San Francisco Public Schools. He immediately opposed the change because he saw his daughter getting really bored.

PATRICK WOLFF: What they wanted to have happen is if we teach all the kids together, then everybody will accelerate as much as possible.

That's what they wanted to have happen, and then they made claims and told a story in the math that just turned out just not to be true.

CHAKRABARTI: Wolff is executive director of the advocacy group, Families for San Francisco, which used publicly available data to challenge claims that the district was making that their program was successful.

Mainly the idea is that the de-track program boosted the number of students in higher math courses. His group's analysis called those claims into question. And researchers at Stanford University of all places later published a paper agreeing with the parents and also concluded that de-track math did not produce, or excuse me, did not reduce income or racial disparities in honors math classes.

Ultimately, the San Francisco Unified School District restored advanced coursework in middle and early high school math. Last year, the city in fact voted on it, but for Wolff, the damage had already been done. He and his wife decided to send their son and daughter to a private school.

WOLFF: I don't think it's good to have a situation where parents who are fortunate enough to have the means just routinely send their kids to private schools, and the public schools are not viewed as a good enough alternative. I think that's terrible, and I care very much that the public schools serve everyone as best as possible. But I can tell you that I am convinced that it was for the best for our kids to send them to private high school.

And the postscript is my daughter is now on the honors track in private school and doing an outstanding job. And she's really engaged in math and science. Again, I can't say what would've happened if she'd gone to public high school, but I can tell you that my wife and I didn't have confidence that would happen.

And I think that's really sad.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, Wolff acknowledges that in San Francisco, about 5% of Black students and 7% of Latino students make it to classes like AP Calculus. So he acknowledges that's a real disparity. The number is three times higher for white students and five times higher for Asian students.

But he feels there will always have to be tracking in districts who want to serve all abilities, even if the tracks themselves become less rigid.

WOLFF: And some kids are going to be at different places than other kids. Anybody who's involved in schools just knows this is true. And I think one of the things that's going to be very hard, but we just have to face it, is when we authentically meet kids and families where they really are, we will see the patterns of multiple generations of history emerge.

And we have to simply acknowledge that and press forward and provide the maximum opportunity and support to all kids. I'm wholly in favor of that. I suspect that when that happens, what we will see is some kind of emergence of different levels, different paces of education for different kids, because that's just what it means to meet kids authentically where they are.

CHAKRABARTI: That's Patrick Wolff, a parent in San Francisco. Carol Corbett Burris, would you like to respond to that?

CORBETT BURRIS: Yeah, I would. It was very interesting in listening. I don't know whether San Francisco school district did that reform well or it didn't. My guess is probably not from what he said, but I guess, my rejoinder would be this.

We've had tracking for years, decades in this country. If tracking was the solution, then why hasn't everything gotten better? There was a preponderance of studies when there were rigid tracking systems in the past that showed that kids, especially low achievers, were being left behind.

Were doing poorly. What is the right amount of tracks to meet all students' needs? Is it two? Is it three? Is it 10? Is it 12? I don't know. Maybe this brave new world of AI will solve all of those problems, but tracking has not worked. So we have to take a look at something else. When we do, though, we obviously have to do it better than they did in San Francisco. Because if they were not moving more students into advanced classes, something was wrong with their implementation.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, I think this is why, again, having you on with your experience in New York State is so interesting because I am thinking that most districts are not doing it in the way that you did, because we're a couple of decades in now to the real acceleration of this de-tracking movement and things still aren't better.

Again, the data just doesn't support that achievement gaps have been closed. So that solution in and of itself is also not improving things. Because isn't it partially true that what's happening is that no matter what you try to tinker with inside classrooms, it's not going to overcome the inequities that students are experiencing outside the classroom.

Actually, Scott, let me turn to you with that question.

PETERS: And you set it up really well. Some colleagues and I looked at where students started at the beginning of kindergarten using some nationally representative data. And found that, the average kid, the kid right in the middle of the road at the start of kindergarten, takes about two and a half years just to get to the point where a kid in the top 5% starts the year.

So that's how diverse students are in terms of the skills, like literally what math they can do, what reading they can comprehend when they start kindergarten. So if you have kids that come into the classroom, they come into your school district, they come into your classroom and they're that diverse.

They have that wide range of needs, and that's because of this systematic inequality we have in the United States, some students start kindergarten. They've had a $100,000 spent on their education already, and some have had very few learning opportunities.

You're going to have large disparities, and so the question that faces us later on in school, whether we get to middle school or high school, is students have come in with such different places that the only way to reduce disparities is either to build up students who haven't had opportunities and provide them with opportunities. A lot of the things that Carol was describing, or if we remove learning opportunities from advanced students and slow down their rate of growth, and I'm not at all suggesting that's what Carol was doing, but if we slowdown that rate of growth as well, just think of the slope of two lines.

You're going to bring students closer together. And I think that's what the parent in San Francisco was really concerned about. Is this gonna be a case where students who are ready for more are not allowed to learn more, so that it will reduce disparities? And again, not suggesting I don't know what they were doing, but that's the concern I think a lot of parents bring up, is that they want their students to be challenged.

I think we should want all students to be challenged, but we also want integrated, heterogeneously grouped classrooms that don't have the feel, as Carol was saying, of where you can walk down the hall and tell who's in an advanced class and who's not.

CHAKRABARTI: Because I mean, this word equity, if it's going to be fairly applied, as Carol put it earlier, it means that every student has the chance to excel.

So that means also the students who are, for whatever reason, more advanced.

PETERS: Absolutely.

CHAKRABARTI: It has to include them. Yeah.

PETERS: Absolutely. And this is the problem is that if everyone is learning at the same rate, I'm getting a little into my own algebra here, but if everyone is learning at the same rate, then you're never really closing gaps.

And so if advanced students are learning faster, then your gaps are getting worse. If advanced kids are learning slower, then your gaps are narrowing. And so we have this pull and tug, where we have two values that we wanna have in schools. We want everyone to be learning new things.

We don't want kids to be bored; we don't want kids to have behavior problems because they're bored. But at the same time, we want to decrease disparities. And it's really hard to have both of those things. It's not impossible, but it does take a lot of really nose to the grindstone work.

Like the extra, whether it's extra tutoring or extra help before school. If we're going to help the kids who haven't had as many opportunities to catch up, I think we really underappreciate as a society the amount of work and time that requires.

So this brings me back to something that Newton, Massachusetts teacher Ryan Normandin wrote, he said:

We acknowledge that tracked classes have problems, but as far as we can tell, multi-level classes are worse. Classes may appear more diverse with all students mixed in one room, but no data have been presented to suggest these classes are actually helping Black, Latino, and low-income students.

And then he goes on to write:

The concept of anti-racism is often cited by administration officials. And it should not involve blindly insisting that these classes are working simply because they make administrators feel good.

CHAKRABARTI: Now Carol, I'm gonna come back to you on that for a second, but this is actually the opportunity to really take a step back and talk about the bigger picture here with education in America, because there is an important social history to understand. And it's driven, I'd say, the de-tracking movement from its very beginnings and one of those beginnings takes place in 1985 with a then little known education scholar named Jeannie Oakes.

JEANNIE OAKES: So then when we target instruction, rather than thinking about always differentiating instruction, to just recognize and acknowledge students' differences as being normal, whenever we do that targeting, we are then limiting the possibilities for learning for all of your children.

CHAKRABARTI: So in 1985, Jeannie Oakes published Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality.

The book walked through data that Oakes said prove there were vast differences in education quality between different tracks. It was an instant bestseller and remains one of the most influential books written on education. Oakes herself became one of the most influential education scholars in the country.

She worked for years at UCLA, later the Ford Foundation. She died in 2024. But from the beginning, Jeannie Oakes was clear about the true target of her critique. It wasn't just schools; it was American society itself.

OAKES: Because of our racist history and the generally racist social structure in this country, it means that we respond to this diversity with very unproductive cultural patterns.

CHAKRABARTI: That's Jeannie Oakes there in 2008, she believed the true villain was American capitalism.

OAKES: They make it seem normal that even if schools say they have equal opportunities, that disparities are really expected, that they're endemic to the system. It seems normal and advantage parents know this, that in order to transmit their privilege, their place in society to their children, they have to do everything they can to make sure that their children's education is better than other children.

CHAKRABARTI: Oake's critique of American society was very expansive. She asserted that correcting perceived inequalities in a school was essential, not just to equity in this country, but to the preservation of American democracy.

OAKES: I hate to be overly dramatic, but I think that the terrorism and the alienation that we see around the globe today is in part a result of feelings of alienation and structural exclusion.

Now, schools are not entirely responsible for this, but schools are key.

CHAKRABARTI: So for Jeannie Oakes in multiple lectures that she gave, it was clear that what was needed was a total transformation of the entire purpose of schooling in this country, not just about enriching children's minds and preparing them for the future.

Oakes said teachers shouldn't just teach. Their job was now activism.

OAKES: Changing systems so that equity and inclusion are the norm requires something far more than the traditional strategic planning and system improvement methods. But it also requires something that's far more like a social movement, and that means that system leaders, policy makers, teachers, have to make either become social movement activists themselves or to ally themselves with social movement activists in order to make those kinds of changes.

CHAKRABARTI: Jeannie Oakes speaking in 2011 at the Teacher's College of Columbia University.

Carol Corbett Burris, and Scott Peters.

Unfortunately, we only have 90 seconds left here. But Carol, I wanted to ask you, when teachers see themselves, when educators see themselves as activists, and especially with this de-tracking question, does that not put them at risk of being more ideological than educators. And anytime anyone embraces an ideology, there's also the risk of not being willing to see when their activism isn't actually working.

Are we at risk of that here?

CORBETT BURRIS: No, I don't think so. Jeannie, I know Jeannie Oakes. She was a great inspiration to me. She was also a sociologist, so she looked at things through that lens. Our teachers were not social activists. They were Democrats, they were Republicans, they were liberals, they were conservatives.

They were people who cared about all students. And what they were trying to do, their work was to increase the achievement of all kids and to make sure that our school was a school that embraced all students and didn't push some students to the side, the way it had done in the past. Caring about kids, putting the needs of all kids first, saying the best curriculum that a school can teach is the curriculum that has been reserved in the past for the best.

I think that makes a lot of educational sense, and if it furthers social justice, that's great too.

The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.