Enacting excellence policies in schools: School actors' deliberation of values and pressures under varying socioeconomic and school choice conditions

When given the choice, what determines whether schools separate their highest achievers or keep classrooms mixed?

In an article for Review of Education, Visiting Fellow Dr Idit Fast and co-authors examine a STEM acceleration programme in Israel that lets students choose between two educational tracks: a separate, “rigidly tracked” classroom for selected students, or an acceleration programme with mixed classrooms.

Drawing on a nationwide survey of the programme and interviews with school staff, they find that schools’ choices were shaped by perceptions of their socioeconomic composition and competition with other schools. Parents emerged as a particularly strong force. Staff perceptions of parents’ desires influenced decisions, especially where families could choose between schools. Their findings suggest that programme flexibility can unintentionally reproduce inequality, and that school leaders need support to resist pressures that undermine their equity goals.

Abstract

"Student tracking is widespread and has lasting relations with educational inequality. Tracking policies are usually centralised, but there is considerable school-level variation in their implementation and design, with important implications for students. The considerations determining how schools enact tracking policies are currently understudied. We addressed this gap by examining a new STEM tracking programme in Israel with two distinct models: one involving a separate, rigidly tracked classroom, and the other offering a STEM acceleration programme after school while keeping classes heterogeneous throughout the rest of the school day. Building on the policy enactment framework, we examined the factors that shaped schools' decisions about which model to enact. Drawing on a nationwide survey of the programme and interviews with administrators, teachers, and programme coordinators from one school district, we found that the enactment of the programme was shaped by the school actors' perceptions of the school's socioeconomic composition, of parental pressures at the school, and of the school's competition environment. School actors also considered values related to tracking and inequality, but external pressures often determined whether these values were reflected in enactment. The findings show how schools decide whether to enact flexible or rigid tracking and heterogeneous or homogeneous classrooms, a decision with significant implications for broader patterns of inequality within schools. We contribute to the literature on tracking and excellence policies, as well as to the literature on policy enactment in schools."