Honestly, I get pretty tired of the high-flown theoretical discussions of both tracking and clustering/grouping-- on EITHER side.
The bottom line is that the people actually working in real classrooms with real students have always done this, WILL always do it, and pretty much cannot serve ANY students well unless they do it, and they don't need a lot of data on "best practices" and "inclusion" to know how to do the right things with the construct.
Seriously. This isn't rocket science. Teachers are NOT about making kids in the "elephant" group feel like crap because they aren't "tiger" kids. Try teaching BOTH groups of kids that material all at once and only the central quartile is going to be getting "appropriate" instruction, however-- and who does THAT help??
There is also a significant amount of flexibility involved in most 'tracking' systems-- that is, few kids are "locked" into a particular track without any way to flex the placement if it becomes less suitable.
Sheesh.
