Chapter 1: Introduction and Overview

With the federal No Child Left Behind act and new education legislation in all 50 states, educators are pressed to raise academic standards and raise achievement test scores. These developments make the central issues of this book—tracking, ability grouping, and grade retention—all the more salient. They are obviously timely topics for research and comment, and this book, for the first time, considers them together since they bear on the central question of the book’s title, Can Unlike Children Learn Together? Reasonable people of good will, including policy makers, scholars, and K–12 educators, have differing views of the possible benefits, costs, and problems of these issues. What are some of the issues?