Closing the Achievement Gap
There's a good deal of confusion about what it means to close the achievement gap in education. There's the question of what is being measured. Is it the difference in average standardized test scores? Is it grade-point averages? Is it dropout rates? Is it graduation rates? And there's the question of who is being measured. Is it students from wealthy families and those from low-income families? Is it black students and white students? Is it male students and female students? Different scholars use different definitions.
Further complicating the matter, the rhetoric suggests that closing the achievement gap is always good thing (indeed, it's a major goal if not the major goal in U.S. education reform). But logic tells us that's not necessarily the case. For instance, you could close the achievement gap and have all students performing at lower levels than ever. Or you could close the achievement gap by having low-achieving students perform a little better and high-achieving students perform much worse.
This is the concern raised by Tom Loveless in his new report, "High-Achieving Students in the Era of No Child Left Behind," issued by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a nonprofit organization that works with schools in Ohio and advocates for school choice for families. Loveless is troubled to find that while the scores of low-income students did rise significantly, the scores of high-income students barely budged, according to data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress:
"Gaps are narrowing because the gains of low-achieving students are outstripping those of high achievers by a factor of two or three to one," writes Loveless. "The nation has a strong interest in developing the talents of its best students to their fullest to foster the kind of growth at the top end of the achievement distribution that has been occurring at the bottom end. International comparisons of top students around the world invariably show American high-achievers falling short."
Another recent report that analyzes NAEP data, this one from the Center on Education Policy, also found that minorities and the poor are making the greatest gains on national standardized tests, but the center had a different conclusion—namely, that this is good news. "The nation has sought to raise test scores and to narrow the achievement gap," writes Jack Jennings, president and chief executive officer of CEP. "These results show that we are making progress, although much more work needs to be done."
Perhaps both analyses are correct: The progress of disadvantaged students is good news, but it's not to the benefit of students who are already performing at a high level. Every policy yields a winner and a loser, and schools are in the difficult position of having to cater to every type of student at once. If the emphasis is put on helping struggling students, high-performing students most likely will receive fewer resources.
There's certainly more that can be done to help high-performing students (like creating achievement mandates and programs for them, or tracking their progress and rewarding schools that improve both their scores and the scores of struggling students). Given the finite public resources and the huge disparities between the standardized test performance of haves and have-nots, perhaps it's fair that the emphasis is placed where it is. Of course, that logic is a bit harder to swallow at the personal level: If you had a high-performing kid, would you want her in a classroom where she is not the priority?
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Low Performing Students matter too
One may be right about the high achieving students being forgotten about. However, they are advancing with skills needed to carry on to college. They are "advanced" and the challenge is dependent on who is teaching the course. As well as parents motivating their children to do more than just book work- such as extra curricular activities. With this combination, these gifted children have more access to better opportunities than many minorities or low-performing students.
Although, statistics may show that low-performing students are increasing their standardized scores more than their white counterparts, a lot still needs to be done to give them the opportunity to advance like their white counterparts do.
Gifted students are pretty much ignored
With the current NCLB emphasis, my experience is that the gifted students are pretty much ignored, especially at the high school level. In my area (coastal AL) the gifted program is primarily an elementary school pull-out program. There is 1 middle school class (humanities), otherwise they take all the same classes that everyone takes. Once they get to high school, which has 3 diploma choices (regular, advanced or honors), there isn't much of a gifted program because most of these students start taking advanced classes in 10th grade. We had one teacher who coordinated the high school gifted program for over 10 years. In addition to teaching, she functioned as an advisor to help these students make informed decisions in class selection and she supervised Independent Study classes. After years of getting very little support from the school or the district she decided to retire this summer and now there is no program. The school and/or district chose to let the program die.(Note: we have more coaches than we used to.) I'm glad that 2 of my 3 children are out of high school as it's very obvious that the high achievers will be getting fewer resources and less attention, not that there was much to begin with, in order to focus on the low achievers.
low income or low achievement?
There's an assumption in this blog that concerns me. According to the author:
"Loveless is troubled to find that while the scores of low-income students did rise significantly, the scores of high-income students barely budged...
"Gaps are narrowing because the gains of low-achieving students are outstripping those of high achievers by a factor of two or three to one," writes Loveless. "The nation has a strong interest in developing the talents of its best students to their fullest to foster the kind of growth at the top end of the achievement distribution that has been occurring at the bottom end. ...
What was the problem here? The blogger assumes that "poor" and "minority" children automatically are low performing students. This assumption is reinforced when we read that a second report "ALSO" found that poor and minority students were making higher gains.
Loveless spoke only of "low-achieving" students and "high-achieving students" He wasn't talking here about low "income" students and high "income" students.
In fact, low performing students make much greater gains than high performing students regardless of their income or ethnicity.
High-achieving minority and low-income students are the ones paying the price for sloppy rhetoric....they make lower gains than equally able "majority" classmates. To his credit, Loveless did look at these students elsewhere in his report and concluded that a big part of the problem was their lack of access to advanced classes.
Many schools that serve primarily low-income and minority students don't feel that it is important to focus on their high-achieving students or provide programming for them. Why? Perhaps because they aren't supposed to exist.
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