Oakes and Lipton place the history of ability grouping in a social and economic context. According to these two authors, conditions at the turn of the century shaped how the country viewed schools and their mission. Cities were in a deplorable decline, immigration was rising, and factory-based industry caused social crises in every aspect of the American society (Oakes & Lipton, 1990, p. 165). Society turned to the institution of schools in order to find solutions to changes of such major proportion.

Everyone concerned with education--parents, policymakers, and teachers--saw that schools could teach immigrants the American ways. Schools could supervise adolescents and teach them to become factory workers. Schools were believed to be an avenue for upward mobility, and budding professionals learned the higher-status knowledge needed for future work (Oakes & Lipton, 1990, p. 165). Philosophically, the underlying belief for ability grouping practices in the early years was that there really isn't enough good education to go around (Oakes & Lipton, 1990, p. 165). Unfortunately, this mode

At the other end of the ability continuum, Allan summarized that low-ability children do benefit from specific grouping for instruction for part of the day but not from wholesale grouping for long periods of time (1991, p. 65). Oakes reports that children suffer emotionally when placed in classes for slow students. Being in a low track can foster a poor self-concept, lowered life aspiration,s and negative attitudes towards school. She concludes that low track students eventually misbehave or drop out altogether (Oakes & Lipton, 1990, p. 159). Research shows that exceptional students do better when they are not placed in segregated classrooms. Madden and Slavin found that mildly handicapped children and slow learners do best in the regular classroom (Dawson, 1987, p. 361).

At this time, the prevailing mode of economic thinking influenced society to view children as raw material from which adults would be created. From a modern standpoint, this is a bit difficult to conceptualize, but it is congruent with an industrial philosophy. Efficient factories were desirable for industrial America, and the schools were viewed as factories which were supposed to turn out educated persons, much as Fords from an assembly line (Oakes & Lipton, 1990, p. 167). Scientific styles of management led policymakers to behave much the same as quality control workers in the plant; differences among children were labeled as flaws and grouped in conveniently managed ways.

In 1991 Susan Allan summarized the research on ability grouping, provoking controversial debate in the professional journals. She carefully made a distinction between the meta-analytic technique used by James Kulik and Chen-Lin Kulik and the best-evidence synthesis technique employed by Robert Slavin (Allan, 1991, p. 63). Allan generalizes that gifted and high-ab