Literature, Geography, and the Untracked English Class

Last summer just after my husband and I returned from a five-week vacation, I ran into John, one of my former students. Your son told me you went to India, he said. Is that in Africa? Later, as I was telling my husband about my student's question and lamenting the gaps I see in the education of many students, it occurred to me that John's question had offered a solution to a problem I had been puzzling over all summer: how to approach my next year's ninth-grade English class. A month before school ended in June, the principal and vice-principal had agreed to change the way students are programmed into ninthand tenth-grade English classes. Instead of four ability tracks (low for stanines 2 and 3, average for 4 and 5, high for 6 and 7, and honors for 8 and 9), we would have two tracks-honors for certified gifted and high-achieving students (mostly stanines 8 and 9) and a large, mixed-ability group for students in stanines 2 through 7. The decision to change from four tracks to two came from our administrator's own pedagogical aversion to ability grouping as well as from a four-year campaign waged by a group of El Cerrito High School English teachers. Those teachers, collaborators on a research project with Rhona Weinstein of the University of California at Berkeley, had read a great deal of research on school change and at-risk students, had examined that research in their own classrooms, and had formed an ongoing collaborative teaching project-PACT for Promoting Achievement through Cooperative Teachingthat advocated an end to ability grouping at El Cerrito High. As one of the original members of PACT, I was overjoyed at our administrator's bold stand and support of us. I was also a bit cowed: What if the techniques we had incorporated into our classes didn't work with a band that included six stanine levels and not the two to four levels we