Others who have criticized present tracking practices include the National Education Association, the National Council of Teachers of English, the California Department of Education, the State of Alabama, and a variety of federal and state courts. Largely as a result of this widespread condemnation of tracking, schools across the county have embarked on efforts to detrack. All detracking reforms, including court-ordered reforms such as those in Rockford, San Jose, and August, must overcome significant barriers if they are to be successful.
Tracking systems are extraordinarily resilient and resistant to change.
Organizationally, tracking is interconnected to, and supported by, our schools' other practices. Politically, detracking efforts generally must overcome local opposition and build supportive communities both within and outside the school. Instruction is not dominated by lectures, nor is assessment by paper and pencil. One of the special education apprenticeships settings is a summer program for gifted and talented students titled the Summer Enrichment Workshop. Making heterogeneous classrooms work requires a skillful combination of challenging content and a variety of learning strategies, so that diverse groups of students will be able to understand the content.