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The Fordham Institute today released a report on two fascinating studies about the state of high-achieving students under the Bush Administration's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) initiative. The studies indicate that while the lowest-achieving (10th percentile or below) students have indeed made gains as measured by standardized tests since (but not necessarily because of) the institution of NCLB, the highest-achieving students are languishing, making almost no improvement and in many cases not receiving the same amount of attention and opportunity as the lowest-achieving students.
Among the report's findings:
- Teachers are much more likely to indicate that struggling students, not advanced students, are their top priority.
- Low-achieving students receive dramatically more attention from teachers.
What's wrong with that, you ask? Shouldn't we be putting our resources where they're most needed?
Teachers don't think so. Even though their schools are devoting the majority of their resources to struggling students, 86 percent of teachers in the study indicated that schools should focus equally on all students, and not focus so heavily on those who are in the lowest percentile.
Another interesting tidbit from the study: Low-income, black, and Hispanic high achievers on the eighth-grade standardized math test were more likely than their struggling peers to be taught by experienced teachers. These students also were as likely as their higher-income peers to have teachers who majored or minored in math.
The Fordham Institute explains the implications of its studies:
Neither of these studies sought a causal link between the No Child Left Behind Act and the performance of high-achieving students. We cannot say that NCLB "caused" the performance of the nation's top students to stagnate any more than it "caused" the achievement of our lowest-performing pupils to rise dramatically. All we know is that the acceleration in achievement gains by low-performing students is associated with the introduction of NCLB (and, earlier, with state accountability systems). Neither can we be sure from these data that teacher quality explains why some low-income, African-American, and Hispanic students were able to score in the top 10 percent on the 2005 eighth-grade math NAEP, though there does appear to be a relationship between the experience and education of math teachers and their students' performance.
The national survey findings show that most teachers, at this point in our nation's history, feel pressure to focus on their lowest-achieving students. Whether that's because of NCLB we do not know (though teachers are certainly willing to blame the federal law). What's perhaps most interesting about the teachers' responses, however, is how committed they are to the principle that all students (regardless of performance level) deserve their fair share of attention and challenges. Were Congress to accept teachers' views about what it means to create a "just" education system--i.e., one that challenges all students to fulfill their potential, rather than just focus on raising the performance of students who have been "left behind"--then the next version of NCLB would be dramatically different than today's.
The authors of the report write that this unintended consequence--the lack of progress of high-performing students--is "worrisome for America's future competitiveness."
What says the blogosphere? Plenty, even though the report was just released today.
On the Fordham's blog, Flypaper, Mike Petrilli explains how schools might better measure their accountability to students under a revised version of NCLB:
Everyone’s right that policymakers can tweak No Child Left Behind to create incentives for schools to pay attention to the top students and the bottom students (and everyone in between). A new version of the law could, for example, expect schools to help all of their students make progress over the course of the year (not just the ones below “proficiency”). It could give schools credit for helping more students reach the “advanced” level on state tests (though these still not be high enough). And it could allow out-of-year testing so that assessments could accurately measure how far above grade level bright students are—and could then determine whether or not they are staying well above grade level over time.
Eduwonkette writes about the liability of models of accountability that, like NCLB, are based on proficiency rather than growth. Systems that focus on a proficiency goal ask lower-achieving students (and their schools) to make larger gains than higher-achieving students, who likely have already met or exceeded the proficiency target. Accordingly, the high-achieving child grows less than does her struggling peer. This model doesn't take into account students' initial levels of achievement.
At the Core Knowledge blog, Robert Pondiscio writes about his
