Streaming Students?

[Wahoo Redux]

In order not to derail the "Colleges in Financial Straights" thread, this is a thread for info on career streaming in H.S., supposing it is relevant to higher ed in the midst of a pandemic that may (or may not) change the face of education in general.

I know nothing about the subject personally, so this is the first thing I found on Google search: a master's thesis from University of Windsor: Streaming in Secondary Schools....  The writing has some syntactical and clarity issues and I cannot attest to the legitimacy of the review and findings.  Someone else can say more.

This was simply the first source I found:

From the introduction page 2:

Although the intent of this type of streaming to improve student learning and
success through the application of the new Ontario curriculum implemented in 1997
appeared clear and concise in the document, the implications of streaming are much more
complex and varied. Through a review of the literature, it appears that streaming impacts
student success as it relates to ability groups (level of academic achievement) (Curtis,
Livingstone, & Smaller, 1992; Hallinan, 2000; Ireson, et. al., 2001; Ansalone, 2003).
Overall, it was found that streaming is counterproductive for students in lower academic
streams in terms of academic success and self-efficacy. Conversely, others (Zimmer,
2003; Rosenbaum, 2000) found that streaming benefits mainly the higher achieving
academic students and teachers with respect to the organization of the classroom and
instructional delivery.

According to Antonelli (2004), most studies fail to produce evidence showing
streaming as a benefit to the academic performance of lower achieving students. Thus
low achieving students become at risk for developing poor classroom behaviour and study habits. Further it was noted that streaming is a potential cause for reproducing
social inequities (Curtis, Livingstone, & Smaller, 1992; Lucas & Berends, 2002) leading
to further problems of negative peer socialization. It is important to note that these
researchers found streaming in secondary schools produces the possibility for students to
be streamed along socioeconomic or racial lines to the detriment of working class
students and students from visible minority groups.
Grouping by ability has also been found to have an adverse impact on students'
self-esteem, self-efficacy and on their attitudes toward school and school work (Kulik &
Kulik, 1992; Ireson et al., 2001; Oakes, 1985). Oakes (1985) stated that the self-efficacy
of low streamed students becomes more negative with time and these students tend to be
critical of their ability. On the other-hand, Kulik and Kulik (1992) found that ability
grouping tended to raise the self-esteem scores of lower aptitude students and reduce the
self-esteem of higher aptitude students. The differences here may arise from the impact
of teachers' attitudes and behaviours in instructional strategy toward ability grouping
(Kulik & Kulik, 1992; Ireson et al., 2001; Oakes, 1985). Teachers committed to ability
grouping but who teach in mixed ability schools can have an adverse effect on student's
self-efficacy (Barker-Lunn, 1970)

From the "Conclusions and Recommendations" page 62:

In this study and as noted in other studies (Antonelli, 2004, Ryan & Joong, 2005),
educators are labelling the students as "applied level". This implies that students are in
that stream because they have been segregated and labelled by some, often, subjective
selection process that has not changed from the last streaming practice. In the larger
study of the teachers commissioned by the OSSTF, Antonelli (2004) found that teachers
cited behavioural issues as the biggest obstacle to teaching in the Applied stream (p. 5).
These teachers noted that chronic behavioural issues were brought about by incorrect
student placement, lack of support from administration, and the high number of
identified or "at risk" students placed in Applied classrooms.
This reinforces the fear that exists when low-achieving academic students
identify with each other in terms of status level, being labelled as slow or difficult
creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[Hibush]

Thanks for starting this thread.

Streaming is tried off an on in the US. It is clear that grouping students of similar ability makes is much easier to engage the whole class and move forward at a pace that works for most. There is a lot of value in that. The downside is that inequality is explicitly identified an reinforced from an early age. The inequality is proximately in academic ability, but that is often a consequence of varying social and economic status.

The alternative is an egalitarian approach that puts everyone together. That mixing is really valuable for socialization. The teaching is less efficient, but there is a veneer of everyone being equally competent. Of course, students are not equally competent, so classroom management is really challenging. Inequality results, probably to the same extent, but the educational system does not have to take responsibility for formalizing it. The rejection of that responsibility is a strong driver, and it is politically supported by both the egalitarian left and the libertarian right. That is the one we go with in the US.

[polly_mer]

Mixing for socialization can go really, really badly for the outliers, either academically minded among the muggles or those who are great with their hands among the bookish.

Limiting classes to what the average can do often shortchanges those who aren't average.  One of my colleagues always used the term 'zipcode effect'. Even just being a high school graduate varies quite a bit by school, even just comparing the college-bound between schools.  The effect can be four full years of schooling.


I have many of the views I do because I came from a K-12 school district that had good vocational track with a tiny college-bound track.  I am also old enough to remember the attendance requirements not being all the way to age 18 and it's been long enough to see that many good paths can exist outside of just academic.

[mamselle]

They called it "tracking" when I was in junior high, and they were just then in the process of dismantling it (~1965-6-7, I think).

In seventh grade, we were the 7-1s, 7-2s, 7-3s, 7-4s, and 7-5s. The "1s" were the highest-achieving group, the "5s" the lowest. I think a few kids might have been moved mid-year if they did better, or worse, than predicted, but the basic idea was we were the A's, B's, C's, D's, and E's by definition.

In 8th grade, they kept the "1s" together, but mixed/melded/merged the rest, keeping about the same number in each class group for administrative simplicity, but not ranking them by grade.

Being in the 1s, I didn't mind...we had less time spent on explaining things that most of us understood, and maybe got a bit further in the textbooks by the end of the year.

I did miss some of the more colorful characters who, while not high grade-earners, had other redeeming (and a few, unredeeming) qualities about them. The ones who cultivated a 'hip' image, wore jean jackets, leather boots, military collars, and so on--and those who railed about the draft, later journeyed up to Kent State, or got tear-gassed on the OSU campus, were also interesting people, and the separation made it harder, for awhile, to talk to them.

M.

[marshwiggle]

Key points from the article:
Streaming in Secondary Schools....

Conversely, others (Zimmer,
2003; Rosenbaum, 2000) found that streaming benefits mainly the higher achieving
academic students and teachers with respect to the organization of the classroom and
instructional delivery.



Kulik and Kulik (1992) found that ability
grouping tended to raise the self-esteem scores of lower aptitude students and reduce the
self-esteem of higher aptitude students.

So even these people who are advocates of non-streaming have to admit it comes at the cost of the high acheiving students and the teachers.

In the larger
study of the teachers commissioned by the OSSTF, Antonelli (2004) found that teachers
cited behavioural issues as the biggest obstacle to teaching in the Applied stream (p. 5).

Whatever class students with "behavioural issues" are put in will suffer.

Those issues don't simply disappear in a non-streamed classroom, but everyone has to live with the effects.

[polly_mer]

The question is whether streaming means "placing people according to their aptitudes so that everyone is more or less satisfied" or "grouping by academic ability so that the lowest academic-performing students are still being force-marched through something that is unpleasant for them for minimal benefit to anyone in the big picture".

Basic literacy and numeracy is something everyone should have an opportunity to do at an early age.

However, accepting that some people aren't bookish and would be better served by a different type of education is a humane thing to do that many European countries do as part of their secondary education.

In the middle school I attended, everyone was required to take shop, home ec, art, academic skills class (note-taking, project management, calendars) as well as the academic classes.  Then, in high school, while everyone took some standard academic classes, people were free to choose electives that resonated with their interests with some standard curricula available that included suggestions for electives that clump well together as a reasonable curriculum:

* a college-bound track that used the University of Wisconsin-Madison admissions as the guide

* a farm-based track because we were a rural community that would prepare one to attend a UW branch campus for ag business or similar major including veterinary sciences.

* an industrial-arts track that included during-school-time apprenticeships for those who knew what they wanted.  This track also had suggested electives in art, writing, theatre, and music as a recognition that one can have many interests.

* a more general education track that included during-school-time internships to let people explore different types of jobs that only need a high school diploma or were suitable for those planning to join the military.

* a more general education track that allowed people to prepare for making good use of their time at a community college by exploring interests and local jobs.

However, having all those tracks available means putting resources into all of them and not treating one track as standard with no support for the others.

I can absolutely believe that keeping people in a track that doesn't suit them leads to behavioral problems.  In some quarters, the discussion of why the US has school shootings often points to the problems with insisting that only one path exists and forcing everyone along that path well after those folks have demonstrated they should be on a different path to better suit their aptitudes and interests.  Putting individuals into nothing-left-to-lose scenarios seldom ends well for anyone involved.

[Durchlässigkeitsbeiwert]

Secondary school streaming was brought in the original thread due to its role in enabling different post-secondary education architecture.
Specifically, it allows some european countries to offer high-quality cheap university education by limiting number of eligible students to ones within "university-bound stream". However, in those cases "streaming" occurs by directing students to different schools, not different classes within the same school, which limits applicability of the research cited here.

[jimbogumbo]

I'm just going to repeat what mamselle said. If you want to access the literature and commentary in the US about this you should search for tracking and laning rather than streaming.

[Wahoo Redux]

I do wonder if the kind of tracking European countries do is even feasible in the U.S.

There are the social factors: We have a different formation history, different very fraught racial history, different economic history, and similar but still distinguishable cultural philosophy than our cousins in the Old World. 

And now we are dealing with masses of Latino/a immigrants. 

One of the sources online (I could find the link if necessary) discussed the fate of Turkish immigrant children in the German tracking system.  It is what one would expect.

I also wonder if it is even necessary.  I grew up in a gray collar town in which the "professional" families with the larger houses lived on the west and north sides of town, and the "working" families lived in much more modest houses on the south side of town.  The students congregated fairly easily in two high schools.  By our sophomore years in high school we all knew who was taking shop and automotive class, who were taking A.P., and who were taking the general college-bound classes.  We had some sort of work-study set up for secretarial students (all of whom took three years of typing), but I can't remember much about it.  I remember they started a "trade" internship in which high school students worked with local contractors during part of the day.  In other words, we self-selected our tracks very naturally.  Perhaps things are different now.

[Puget]

I'm all for giving high schools students choices about what they take. That's VERY different than forcing 12-year-olds into tracks based on someone else's perception of their potential, which is just a recipe for implicit and explicit racial and class biases.

I also think a lot of folks are dramatically under estimating how much "tracking" is built into the US system already, both across schools (who can afford to live in what districts) and within schools (e.g., AP/IB, "gifted" programs), not to mention access to private schools.

I now live in an area where wealthy families buy in the neighboring suburbs because their public schools (supported by high property taxes) rival the best private schools. They are "tracked" into those schools by virtue of being able to afford 800K plus houses. My town, which has perfectly good (and much more diverse) schools that get lower scores mainly because they have more English language learners, has lower (still very high) housing prices in part because of that. In the meantime, poorer areas of the metro area have struggling schools.

I think any discussion of "tracking" has to include first and foremost  how to remediate rather than adding to these inequalities. I say that as someone who was privileged enough that my parents, although solidly middle class, sent me to a private middle school, then shuttled me across town to a much better high school then my local one, where I got to do IB. Did I have "intellectual merit"? Sure, but so did a lot of kids who didn't get those opportunities.

[polly_mer]

In other words, we self-selected our tracks very naturally.  Perhaps things are different now.

How many schools have legitimate, multiple life paths versus different levels of academic rigor?

There's a huge difference between being able to say, "Yes, I'm on the industrial arts path with an apprenticeship program ready for me at age 16" and "There's no reason for me to be in school other than the fact that I am not legally allowed to quit for another N years".

People in some areas don't actually have good choices in the public school system.  The solution to that is not putting more resources into academic remediation in college.  Most solutions to actually solve the problem come under the federal category of career and technical education (CTE) if one wants to do some literature review.

Many of the K-12 inequalities that Puget mentions are directly related to trying to force everyone through just the one academic path with perhaps various levels of support instead of investing in supporting multiple good paths from which people can legitimately choose.  In the resource-constrained areas, some of the first programs to get cut are the expensive ones like industrial arts (all those machines that need to be close to cutting edge, highly qualified people who have great options other than teaching, and the additional overhead of running good apprenticeship/internship/shadowing programs) in favor of the academic ones where the good enough resources are mostly a teacher and a classroom.

It is again another problem of the people who most need the additional resources for education are the ones who are least able to fund it and are least likely to know all the options for what they could do with the funds they have.  I routinely encounter discussions in CTE circles indicating that part of their problem is getting out the word that these programs exist and that they lead to good lives.  The dirty, horrible factory of yesteryear that people are picturing has little to do with the clean, modern US factory where one is mostly programming a computer to do new things within the standard patterns. 

https://www.mikeroweworks.org is an organization helping people find out about the great opportunities in the trades.  However, coming from an urban environment with zero experience even as part of a formal class or after-school club doesn't work out all that well for many people who would have been better served with industrial arts options in middle school and high school to have literal years of experience before trying to enter an apprenticeship or other vo-tech program.

[marshwiggle]

I think any discussion of "tracking" has to include first and foremost  how to remediate rather than adding to these inequalities. I say that as someone who was privileged enough that my parents, although solidly middle class, sent me to a private middle school, then shuttled me across town to a much better high school then my local one, where I got to do IB. Did I have "intellectual merit"? Sure, but so did a lot of kids who didn't get those opportunities.

My kids all did IB, and the best thing about IB, by far, was the culture. In IB it was normal for kids to want to do well; the disaffected attitude that is the trope of high school students didn't apply there.
And that's the thing that the people who fight against private schools, streaming, and everything of that nature need to admit; by keeping everyone together, the ones with the bad attitudes poison the atmosphere for everyone else. The brightest students will hate it, but they'll get through. The ones who suffer most from that are the weak students who aren't discipline problems, since they won't get the attention they need as all of the oxygen (and teacher time, resources, etc.) gets sucked up by the obnoxious ones.

[Hibush]

I think any discussion of "tracking" has to include first and foremost  how to remediate rather than adding to these inequalities. I say that as someone who was privileged enough that my parents, although solidly middle class, sent me to a private middle school, then shuttled me across town to a much better high school then my local one, where I got to do IB. Did I have "intellectual merit"? Sure, but so did a lot of kids who didn't get those opportunities.

My kids all did IB, and the best thing about IB, by far, was the culture. In IB it was normal for kids to want to do well; the disaffected attitude that is the trope of high school students didn't apply there.
And that's the thing that the people who fight against private schools, streaming, and everything of that nature need to admit; by keeping everyone together, the ones with the bad attitudes poison the atmosphere for everyone else. The brightest students will hate it, but they'll get through. The ones who suffer most from that are the weak students who aren't discipline problems, since they won't get the attention they need as all of the oxygen (and teacher time, resources, etc.) gets sucked up by the obnoxious ones.

AP or IB tracking seems fairly common. Those are usually on an individual course basis rather than have  specific group of students take all their courses together. (I recall significant discipline issues in my AP courses, but they were what you'd expect from that kind of student where maturity far lagged smarts.)

We also have special ed as another de facto track. Those are largely students needing a lot of special services that elsewhere would be handled through social services or medical systems rather than the educational system. It is not for the plain student who is just not that into school. 

[Puget]

AP or IB tracking seems fairly common. Those are usually on an individual course basis rather than have  specific group of students take all their courses together. (I recall significant discipline issues in my AP courses, but they were what you'd expect from that kind of student where maturity far lagged smarts.)

I don't think the bolded part is really true in practice for the most part. Especially for IB if you do the full diploma program-- I definitely was with the same group for essentially all my classes (except the occasional elective like art). And that would be just fine if everyone had equal access to those courses and got to self-elect into them. Unfortunately that is not currently the world most Americans are living in.