“The narrowing of test score gaps, although an important accomplishment,” Loveless writes, should not “overshadow the languid performance trends of high-achieving students.” He adds: “Their test scores are not being harmed during the NCLB era, but they are not flourishing either. 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. 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.”
Ann Duffett, Steve Farkas & Tom Loveless on the “Robin Hood Effect”:
This publication reports the results of the first two (of five) studies of a multifaceted research investigation of the state of high-achieving students in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era.
Part I: An Analysis of NAEP Data, authored by Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless, examines achievement trends for high-achieving students (defined, like low-achieving students, by their performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP) since the early 1990s and, in more detail, since 2000.
Part II: Results from a National Teacher Survey, authored by Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett of Farkas Duffett Research Group, reports on teachers’ own views of how schools are serving high-achieving pupils in the NCLB era.
This is, of course, what many of us have been saying for quite some time.
This is, of course, the same Tom Loveless who wrote “The Tracking Wars.”
And this is, of course, exactly what the St. Louis Black Leadership Roundtable study found in 2005, when it looked at several years’ worth of data for the 25 or so school districts in the greater St. Louis area, all of whom had participated in a city-suburb desegregation effort. In a word, the districts that had the greatest decrease in their black-white achievement gap also had the lowest absolute level of achievement for their black students. And the districts with the largest black-white achievement gaps had the highest level of black student achievement. Of greatest concern was the finding that the decrease in gap size was due to reduced or flat achievement among white students, not so much improved performance among black students.
Is this good enough? Is this our goal? No achievement gaps because everyone is doing equally poorly? We have so confused ourselves about equity and excellence.
For all students, the most worrisome gap is that between their potential — what they are capable of doing — and what they actually do (the standards of excellence we do or do not hold them to). Asa Hilliard III discusses this well in the context of African American achievement in the book “Young, Gifted and Black: Promoting High Achievement Among African American Students.”