USA Today (3/18, Toppo) reports that a new study from the Brookings Institution's Center on American Education "suggest that despite decades of controversy, elementary school teachers now feel fine placing students in 'ability groups,'" noting that the study "finds that between 1998 and 2009, the percentage of fourth-grade teachers who said they created ability-based reading groups skyrocketed from 28% to 71%. In math, between 1996 and 2011, the practice rose from 40% to 61%." Noting that the practice has been discouraged in past decades as being a "civil-rights issue," USA Today reports that Brookings researcher Tom Loveless said "new demands from the federal 2002 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, which required schools to focus on struggling students in reading and math," may have prompted the trend.
The AP (3/19, Elliott) reports that the report "shows a dramatic increase in both ability grouping and student tracking among fourth- and eighth-grade students. Those practices were once criticized as racist and faced strong opposition from groups as varied as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to the National Governors Association." The AP quotes Loveless saying, "Despite decades of vehement criticism and mountains of documents urging schools to abandon their use, tracking and ability grouping persist - and for the past decade or so, have thrived."
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