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Students were tracked into the various curricula based largely on IQ but sometimes other factors such as race and skin color.

public schools have done away with "tracking"

deemed low achievers or of low cognitive ability?

Jonathan Kozol brought accusations against a system they found racist and sadistic.

to restore equity to

Kozol and others did not go away, and the progressive watchword in education has continued to be "equality."

-- a practice viewed by many in the education establishment as synonymous with tracking

Unfortunately, the efforts and philosophies of otherwise well-meaning individuals have attempted to eliminate the achievement gap by eliminating achievement.

In other words, the elimination of ability grouping has become a tracking system in itself that leaves many students behind.

Dallas Independent School District

The rise of computer-aided learning might make it easier for them to instruct students who learn at different rates.

this enables students placed in lower-ability classes to advance to higher-ability classes based on their performance and progress.

They expect to see that you've thought about limits and objections to your claim.

We also know that whatever it is we think, it is never the entire truth. Our conclusions are partial, incomplete, and always subject to challenge. So we write in a way that allows others to test our reasoning: we present our best thinking as a series of claims, reasons, and responses to imagined challenges, so that readers can see not only what we think, but whether they ought to agree.

So your first step in writing an assigned paper occurs well before you begin writing: You must know what your instructor expects.

Start by looking carefully at the words of the assignment.

When most of your instructors ask what the point of your paper is, they have in mind something different. By "point" or "claim" (the words are virtually synonymous with thesis), they will more often mean the most important sentence that you wrote in your essay, a sentence that appears on the page, in black in white; words that you can point to, underline, send on a postcard; a sentence that sums up the most important thing you want to say as a result of your reading, thinking, research, and writing. In that sense, you might state the point of your paper as "Well, I want to show/prove/claim/argue/demonstrate (any of those words will serve to introduce the point) that "Though Falstaff seems to play the role of Hal's father, he is, in fact, acting more like a younger brother who . . . ."" If you include in your paper what appears after I want to prove that, then that's the point of your paper, its main claim that the rest of your paper supports.