Chapter 7: Moving off Track: Mathematics Teacher Education for All Attainment Teaching

Using previous attainment, often erroneously referred to as “ability,” to form teaching groups for learners of mathematics is regarded as the norm in some countries. Organization of mathematics teaching by arrangements such as setting in the United Kingdom and tracking in the United States are dominant and pervasive (Boylan & Povey, 2009a; Le Tendre, Hofer, & Shimizu, 2003; Oakes, Ormseth, Bell, & Camp, 1990). In the attempt to meet the demands to “raise standards,” since the start of the century, attainment grouping has arguably become more embedded in both high schools and elementary ones and in the United Kingdom even in the early grades (McSherry & Ollerton, 2002; OFSTED, 2008). The pressures to increase attainment grouping both in the organization of classes and within classes is connected to the establishment of high stakes accountability regimes that has come to dominate education systems in the United States, United Kingdom, and elsewhere over the last 20 years. Even in education systems with more egalitarian traditions, attainment grouping is now being introduced (Braathe, 2010). This is in spite of evidence that grouping in this way does not raise achievement generally (Oakes et al., 1990; Slavin, 1990), nor specifically in mathematics (Boaler, 1997; Burris, Heubert & Levin, 2006; Venkatakrishnan & Wiliam, 2003; Wiliam & Bartholomew, 2004). Moreover, many countries that are considered to have higher mathematical attainment on the basis of international comparator tests such as TIMMS and PISA do not routinely group students in this way. The evidence reviewed in this chapter suggests, ironically, that detracking is potentially a more productive response to pressures on schools to increase test scores (Burris, Wiley, Welner, & Murphy, 2008). This discontinuity between what is asserted about grouping by attainment and what we know about grouping by attainment underlines the power and embedded nature of the ideology of “ability.” The arguments for attainment groups are made through an ideological rhetoric of individual and national interest rather than public interest.