Indigo, I'd try Google Scholar. I don't know if you have university library access, however. There are lots of articles about this. I've read them in the past for work. It is, of course, a political subject, as are many education topics.
As I say, I don't necessarily agree with the antitracking POV but I consider it very reasonable to look at the data, and some does seem to show that tracking can create issues. Now, is that the fault of ability grouping as a concept or poorly done ability grouping? That's another question. But I have to have concern for kids who were "tracked" early, are stuck in that track, and could achieve more. What if it were your own child? Some of our 2E kids could easily get "tracked" into a low-achieving group. In fact, it's been discussed here on the board. Parents get up in arms about it because they feel the child is being denied opportunity.
I think part of what needs to be thought about is something GT advocates don't love to think about: ability is not as fixed or as easily determined by a test as we might like. A child might test high as a preschooler due to an enriched environment and struggle later in a high track. A child may test low due to being ESL or 2E but be capable of more. I know some gifted kids who are not motivated and prefer to focus on other things, and some bright-not-gifted kids who are highly motivated and can cope with having a lot asked of them. All these children may be poorly served by a rigid tracking system. In HS, a friend of mine transferred from another district and was put in the "average" track because that's wht my high-achieving school did with new kids. She was gifted in science but it took two years before the school relented and moved her up to AP. That was a waste of her time and ability.
I don't regret having been tracked as a child, but I saw its negative effects as well. If we do track and group, we have to be open to changes in children's skills and abilities. But many parents would fight their child being "demoted" tooth and claw. (FTR, I was demoted in math out of the accelerated track and into "high average." It was likely the right choice, and my parents were dismayed but did not protest.)
A lot of this information about the complexities of ability grouping is very old news, and I would expect that people on this forum are generally well aware of the issues and have thought deeply about them. Life is complex, and sometimes things that are important and worth doing are difficult and complicated. We all already knew all that.
The question is how do you optimize learning over a population of children with a huge variation in learning capacity, subject to constraints of practicality (e.g. budget constraints in teacher student ratios). A very simple obvious effective method is to group students by ability/achievement and deliver to them an education tailored to their current level. Sure, there are many complex issues, but the benefits of ability grouping, in terms of optimizing learning, are so huge, that this is what should be done, and there are no grounds for not doing so. Ability grouping is by a huge margin the single most effective way to optimize learning. Nothing else comes close. There is really no alternative.
But the anti-tracking advocates in the links mentioned in this thread,
http://nepc.colorado.edu/newsletter/2013/05/options-trackinghttp://www.ascd.org/publications/bo...-Is-and-How-to-Start-Dismantling-It.aspxhave absolutely no interest in improving education by improving the implementation of ability grouping. Instead they advocate a scorched earth policy of systematically eliminating every trace of ability grouping.
