Reviews

BECOMING GOOD AMERICAN SCHOOLS: The Struggle for Civic Virtue in Education Reform , by Jeannie Oakes, Karen Hunter Quartz, Steve Ryan, and Martin Lipton. (Jossey-Bass, $28.95.) From 1991 to 1996, detracking advocate Oakes of the University of California at Los Angeles and three like-minded colleagues studied 16 middle schools in five states. They wanted to gauge how well these schools had implemented the progressive reforms of the Carnegie Foundation's 1989 report Turning Points, which, among other things, urged middle schools to abandon tracking, implement cooperative-learning techniques, and promote close adult-student relationships. Although many educators in the schools had done their best to make the reforms work, they were thwarted, the researchers found, by the sheer weight and inertia of the status quo. "At every turn," the authors write on the first pages of this massive book about their findings, "their commitment to the common good confronted the culture's equally strong (or stronger) commitment to the individual's right to determine what is in his or her best interest and to the preeminence of marketplace values."

This sentence is crucial, for it reveals the polarizing you're-with-us-or-against-us mind-set of both the authors and the educational left in general. On one side are the good guys, those who support classroom reforms—detracking, cooperative learning, etc.—as a way of creating a more caring, socially just society; on the other hand are the bad, mean-spirited elitists who undermine progressive, equity-driven reform. The villains come in many guises, though they are most often recidivistic veteran teachers and affluent, self-serving parents. What characterizes both sets of naysayers is their support for tracking; they are going to fight to the bitter end for honors classes and other forms of ability grouping.

As Oakes and company demonstrate here, tracking and reform are particularly contentious when it comes to the teaching of math. Most math teachers stridently resist heterogeneous groupings because, as one teacher told the researchers, "the top kids get screwed"; these students are forced to bide their time while hampered teachers explain concepts over and over to their less adept peers. Parents of bright children tend to feel the same. They oppose anything that's going to slow their kids down. The authors describe how a group of parents at one Vermont middle school fought to rid the curriculum of a popular, innovative math program because they believed it was not preparing their children for...