Closing the Achievement Gap

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.

Raising the Bar for the Gifted

I just responded to another article on the "Fun and Fluff" issue which has been voiced by politicians when asked for monetary assistance for our programs. My friends, the answer is in the strategies used to motivate our gifted students to rise to the level of their ability, which in some cases is beyond the tests their taking. All teachers of the gifted should be using the same Ohio Standards that every teacher uses, but different in the fact that we should have the flexibility to accelerate and move beyond the grade level. Today's competion with India, China,along with other global interests tells us we must pay attention to higher level content in order to stay competitive and keep our nation rising on the global front. Some students have the inner motivation to do it on their own. Others need that spark to be kindled by those of us who guide them. Gifted kids need to learn how to learn and keep that fuel going for the rest of their lives. I'm giving the keynote address at the state gifted conference in Mississippi in Sept and have taught gifted children for many years. I believe we are on the brink of mandating gifted programs if we can show the results,and raising the bar for the gifted is exactly that challenge. We need to consider how we are giving the appropriate tests in order to know that the results are valid. Our school piloted a computerized testing program from Northwest University which automatically raises the level of question when the student answers correctly which gives a true understanding of the student's knowledge but it's not nationally normed and therefore cannot be used as the achievement portion of the state requirements. There must be a way to standardize it in the future or find an instrument that works in a similar manner. That, my friends, is the point at which we will be able to truthfully raise the bar of the gifted.