Last week, the parents in my son’s school gathered to hear about the children’s transition into the next grade. One administrator mentioned that while most subjects at the school are not tracked, one of them is. There was instant tension in the room – it felt as if he had muttered a racist epithet under his breath.

“We all remember what it was like being tracked,” one mother began. “I don’t want my son to feel that way.”

Despite the administrator’s attempt to point out that there were studies done to prove the academic benefits of certain kinds of tracking, the message among the parents was clear: Tracking was to be avoided at all costs.

Since when did protecting children from the reality that they are good at some subjects and not so good at others trump the importance of effectively educating them?

Tracking, also called ability grouping, is one of those slippery subjects where you can find the evidence to buoy which ever argument you care to support. It was introduced into American schools in the early part of the 20th century and was ubiquitous by the time my generation was educated in the 1970s and 1980s.

But by the early 1990s, the name of the game in education became detracking. Tracking, it seemed, had preserved social hierarchies, whereby rich white students were placed in the high level tracked subjects, and poor minority students were over-represented in the lower groups. When teachers lowered their expectations about a group of students, the children’s performance declined. Some studies even showed that when mixed together in one class room, less capable students performed at much higher levels, while the brighter students performed just as well as they did when they were tracked.

Many New York parents didn’t even consider these thorny issues when I asked them about the subject of tracking. The practice is still alive and kicking in some parts of the city, and is long dead in others. Private schools, especially, run the gamut when it comes to grouping by ability.

“I don’t need my son to feel like an idiot by putting him in the low level science class,” a mother of two boys told me. “The schools have to find quality teachers who can handle a diverse group of abilities in one classroom.”

But the teachers I spoke to – at both private and public schools – were uniformly in favor of tracking.

One eighth-grade teacher at a public school said that she loved the idea of detracking her students, but that in practice it just didn’t work.

“If you take 30 14-year-olds and try to teach them pre-algebra, you’re going to naturally have a group that gets it much faster than the rest. You’re also going to have a group that needs so much more help understanding the subject – much, much more than the rest of the class,” she said. “If you try to teach all those kids together, the great math students will be bored and the weak math students will feel bad. As for the middle group, they’ll be lucky if they aren’t distracted by the kids who have no idea what’s going on, or the kids who knew how to answer the problems before class began. Some subjects just need to be grouped by ability.”

Another teacher at an independent school downtown said that she understood parents’ ambivalence about tracking, but that it allowed for a better classroom experience. “Younger children certainly don’t need to know what’s going on when reading groups are formed. But ultimately, grouping children by ability allows you to teach more effectively.”

One mother of three children in their 20s said that she views tracking as a necessary evil. “I’ve had the math-A student and the math-reject student too. They both went to the same school, four years apart, and both survived. The good math student felt great about being challenged in the class. He also struggled to pass Spanish. My kid in the low math class survived the stigma of being with the dumb kids, if you will. I told her to get over it and do well in the class and she did.”

A retired administrator from a private uptown school said that this issue infuriates him. “Thirty years ago, believe me, we didn’t let the needs of the bottom 10% of the class dictate the curriculum for the upper 30%. That’s what’s going on today in some schools. Then the bottom 10% gets Bs, and the middle group gets B pluses and A minuses, and the top group gets As. Because God forbid these city kids get Cs. That might crush them. For $30,000 a year, it would certainly crush their parents.”

It is noble to want to protect the feelings of children who might not be as academically gifted as others. And there is nothing more American than to want all our children to be afforded an equal education.

If we continue to worry so much about protecting our children from the reality that they are not the best at everything, instead of focusing on raising our educational standards, we will leave our children a legacy far more problematic than momentarily bruised egos.

sarasberman@aol.com