NONFICTION - Nov. 15, 1992

CROSSING THE TRACKS: How ‘Untracking’ Can Save America’s Schools by Anne Wheelock (The New Press: $19.95; 311 pp.). Tracking--policy analyst Anne Wheelock calls it, woodenly, “the categorizing of students according to particular measures of intelligence into distinct groups for purposes of teaching and learning”--seemed a good idea not so many years ago. What better way to educate a child than by tailoring a curriculum to his or her abilities? Well, so much for theory: It’s clear, now, that few measures of ability are culturally and racially neutral, and that the students who are most likely to succeed on their own--that is, those deemed most “able”--receive the best education. “Crossing the Tracks” is less a description of the untracking process than a training manual, but it gets across the major whys and hows of untracking: the benefits of heterogenous classrooms, peer-instruction, teamwork and real-world-based learning, and the problems posed by parental resistance, teacher inertia and fears of “dumbing down.” Wheelock makes the untracking of tracked education seem a daunting but essential task, not least because untracked learning necessarily turns the classroom into a microcosm of the culture in which children must make their way. As one student is quoted as saying about a year spent in a newly untracked school, “Having everyone all mixed up in classes makes me feel part of the whole group, not just with my own few friends.”