ABSTRACT

Today’s public school classrooms represent ever-increasing profiles of diversity. Societal forces, such as immigration (cf. Hodgkinson, 1995), lead to linguistic, ethnic, and cultural differences, which afford many important advantages. Another form of classroom diversity, however, challenges the capacity of schools to provide appropriate instruction. That is, education policies such as “detracking” (e.g., Braddock et al., 1992) and “inclusion” (D. Fuchs & Fuchs, 1994) have converged to make public school classrooms more academically diverse. In fact, the degree of academic heterogeneity in the typical urban classroom is striking. For example, in recent work in the area of reading (L. S. Fuchs & Fuchs, 2003) conducted in urban second-grade classrooms, teachers averaged 22 children whose curriculumbased measurement reading scores (i.e., words read correctly in 1 minute from connected text) within a single classroom ranged, on average, between 0 and 183.