Teachers’ attitudes towards tracking: testing the socialization hypothesis

Abstract

The paper examines how teachers’ attitudes towards tracking (separating pupils into groups with different curricula on the basis of their abilities and results) differ among various generations of teachers. Fundamental and quick changes in the educational system occurred in the Czech Republic after the Velvet Revolution in 1989 as a unified educational system moved to a system strongly accenting tracking practices. We use this ‘policy discontinuity’ to validate teacher socialization theory and test three alternative socialization hypotheses based on different key periods in teachers’ development: the pupil experience hypothesis, the pedagogical preparation hypothesis and the pedagogical experience hypothesis. We work with a data-set from 2009 covering 1002 Czech teachers. The mean tests and the logistic regression analysis support the socialization theory, however only the pedagogical experience hypothesis was found to be most influential.

Keywords:

• educational change
• ability grouping
• teacher attitudes
• teachers’ socialization
• post-communist countries

Notes

1. Though the terminology is not always consistent and the terms are often used interchangeably, the term ‘ability grouping’ is frequently used when discussing within-class curriculum differentiation while the term ‘tracking’ is often used to capture the more stable and between-class placement of students into different kinds of educational programs within in a school (like vocational tracks and college preparatory tracks). In some countries like Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic, there is also curriculum differentiation between schools. This has also usually been termed as tracking, though some authors talk about ‘branching’ in that case (Veselý 2012). For the purpose of this article we use the term ‘tracking’ (see methodological section for its empirical operationalization).

2. There are about 5% of the age cohort educated separately in special education schools.

3. The existence of the higher track for pupils with excellent study results and the lower track for pupils with weak study results is perceived by teachers as two different phenomena (see Mouralová 2013), even though there are some common roots.

4. Both the pedagogical preparation period and the beginning of teachers’ careers are estimated as the standard study period without an interruption in studies.

5. LeTendre, Hofer, and Shimizu (2003) point out differences in attitudes towards tracking among teachers of various countries. The roots of the intercultural variation lie in different educational systems influencing teachers’ experiences and also in different national or cultural ‘software’ (Hofstede 2001) since various cultures differ from each other in levels of individualism, competitiveness, need for rules and so on.

6. We regard the data as secondary, even though one of the co-authors was a member of the methodological board on the side of the contracting authority (Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports) and had a partial influence on research design and scope.

7. All primary education teachers are also categorized as teaching ‘mixed’ subjects.