Achievement Gap - Gifted Issues Discussion Forum

Our district superintendent sent out a letter with New Year's goals. Here's an excerpt:

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As a district, we are not quite halfway through the school year. Today is the 84th day of instruction and we have 93 days left with our kids. As I reflect on our progress, I continue to believe that we are doing an outstanding job with the kids who are performing on the upper end of our spectrum. We still have an enormous amount of work to do to ensure that all kids are reaching excellence. I feel very good about our schools that have closed achievement gaps, but they are the exception rather than the norm. We have to close those gaps and must continue to work hard to accomplish this goal. When all students, no matter the demographics, reach proficiency, there will be no gaps.

I beg to disagree with the statement that "we are doing an outstanding job with the kids who are performing on the upper end of the spectrum." The part that has me scratching my head is the last statement. How do you interpret this? "When all students, no matter the demographics, reach proficiency, there will be no gaps."

Assuming this is NCLB related, I came across this policy primer:
http://www.subnet.nga.org/educlear/achievement/

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What is the achievement gap?
The �achievement gap� is a matter of race and class. Across the U.S., a gap in academic achievement persists between minority and disadvantaged students and their white counterparts. This is one of the most pressing education-policy challenges that states currently face.

New urgency at the federal level
Recent changes in Federal education policy have put the spotlight on the achievement gap. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) requires states to set the same performance targets for children:
� From economically disadvantaged families
� With disabilities
� With limited English proficiency
� From all major ethnic and racial groups
Within a school, if any student subgroup persistently fails to meet performance targets, districts must provide public school choice and supplemental services to those students � and eventually restructure the school's governance. This is required even if the school performs well overall.
In other words, schools now are considered successful only if they close the achievement gap.

Now I know why some teachers have dubbed NCLB "No Child Allowed to Get Ahead."

Yes, or: No Child Leaps Beyond.........

Thanks for posting that, I had never actually read it.

"No clothes! No clothes! Come on, people! NO CLOTHES!"

*sigh*

I say again, I really think that pre-testing (above/below level, as an individual child needs) to get a read on where a child is actually performing, then requiring a year's worth of progress from that spot makes the most sense. If every child makes at least a year's worth of progress for a year's worth of school, no one is wasting time. But focusing on some perceived gap as if everyone has equal abilities is just ludicrous. How can anyone accept that?

*double sigh*

P.S. And isn't giving everyone a year's worth of education for a year's worth of time equality? Yes, I think so!

Yes Kriston! The current measurements of gaps are flawed - your idea of pre-testing makes so much sense. The standardized tests should also have a broader range to measure progress at both ends of ability.

According to some data (sent a link on another thread), advanced kids have been making "less" gains on a yearly basis than average kids in school under NCLB - so you could say that there is an achievement gap - gifted children achieve less from baseline over the course of the year!

This article shines some light on why it's so challenging to advocate for gifted programs. If there's a mindset that learning=income then gifted programs are viewed as a way to maintain the income gap. Having friendships with people in the business world and those in academia, I would argue at some point the learning=income theory falls apart.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/14/AR2008071400379.html

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My theory is that we have unconsciously taken our concern about the income gap -- a lively issue in the last several years -- and adopted the same vocabulary when we worry about how our children are doing in school, even though making money and learning to read, write and do math are different enterprises. I can understand distaste for people who build 50-room mansions with gold bathroom fixtures. But can anyone learn too much? Wisdom tends to help everyone who comes in contact with it. Ski chalets in Aspen are less useful to those of us who can't afford them.
While we are at it, why not curtail all this achievement-gap talk? Let's focus instead on the progress of every child, no matter if she or he starts the year two grades behind classmates or two grades ahead. All children deserve a chance to climb as high as they can.

Oh, Inky! I'm off to read that whole article because I LOVE that snippet! Ah, sanity in print! <heart aflutter>

At a meeting tonight, our district superintendent said he's driven by one thing: having all children at proficiency.

I came home and found this report which helped me understand why his statement made my brain hurt.

http://www.epi.org/webfeatures/viewpoints/rothstein_20061114.pdf

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'Proficiency for All' � An Oxymoron
By Richard Rothstein, Rebecca Jacobsen, and Tamara Wilder
Paper prepared for the Symposium, "Examining America's Commitment to Closing Achievement Gaps: NCLB and Its Alternatives," sponsored by the Campaign for Educational Equity, Teachers College, Columbia University, November 13-14, 2006
Richard Rothstein (riroth@epi.org) is a Research Associate of the Economic Policy Institute. Rebecca Jacobsen (rjj7@columbia.edu) and Tamara Wilder (tew2101@columbia.edu) are Ph.D. candidates in Politics and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Here are some excerpts:

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Proficiency for all is an oxymoron, as the term 'proficiency' is commonly understood and properly used.

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We show that by ignoring the inevitable and natural variation amongst individuals, the conceptual basis of NCLB is deeply flawed; no goal can simultaneously be challenging to and achievable by all students across the entire achievement distribution. A standard can either be a minimal standard which presents no challenge to typical and advanced students, or it can be a challenging standard which is unachievable by most below-average students. No standard can serve both purposes � this is why we call 'proficiency for all' an oxymoron - but this is what NCLB requires.

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The movement away from scale and norm-referenced score reports has resulted in the politicization of standardized testing.

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The irresponsibility of NCLB's expectation of 'proficiency for all' should not lead to the abandonment of goals for the improvement of student achievement, nor does it suggest that public education systems should not be accountable for realizing challenging degrees of improvement. We describe a simple statistical procedure, inspired by 'benchmarking' practices employed in the business world, which can be used to establish strenuous but realistic goals for improved achievement by students at all points in the distribution. Benchmarking permits a sophisticated return to norm-referenced measures of academic achievement, something not new to education but which has been abandoned in the NCLB legislation.

[quote=KristonI say again, I really think that pre-testing (above/below level, as an individual child needs) to get a read on where a child is actually performing, then requiring a year's worth of progress from that spot makes the most sense. If every child makes at least a year's worth of progress for a year's worth of school, no one is wasting time. But focusing on some perceived gap as if everyone has equal abilities is just ludicrous. How can anyone accept that?
[/quote]

Go Kriston!
I just finished the book 'Outliers' that proposes that the achievement gap/ income levels isn't really something that takes place during the school year, as much as it takes place over the summer. I would strongly support Kristons 'Years worth of progress in a year's worth of time' and, if the data suggested in Outliers is found to be reproducable and reasonable, add to that a sliding scale fee summer program of academics so that kids who don't have home environments that facilite learning can be kept from falling further behind every summer. I was suprised to learn that kids in the US have significanly longer school breaks than kids in other parts of the world.

I guess I would also be in favor of studing other countries that are getting good results from their education systems and testing if we can impliment those stratagies here.

Grinity

Hmm ... how do you define a years' worth of progress? If gifted kids are capable of learning much more in a years' time than your ND kid (and I think that most of us agree that HG+ kids are), then is this goal even measurable? If we're looking strictly at academics versus social goals, it seems like a "year's progress" is a prohibitively nebulous term.

I guess I've become increasingly cynical that the traditional model is the ideal for our HG+ kids. There is just no way to really include them in the system without shortchanging them in some way -- the system is simply not built for them. Short of a one-on-one situation ... there is no ideal, educationally speaking, for these kids. Which is *so* frustrating to see as a parent!

Although ds6's private school is working well and he's happy there, I can see that educationally, he's best suited working on his own. Even among gifted (125+) peers, he often chooses to work alone in his math class, when the other students (mostly 7, 8 and 9yos) are working in groups -- he prefers his own methods and his own thought processes, which work great for him -- and he's excelling there. Working with other kids distracts him and slows him down, and even at 6yo he recognises this. How much more so must this be true for the HG+ student in a standard classroom?

Quite honestly, I don't know how "gifted education" can really work for our kids without dedicated classrooms for like-ability kids. I wish heartily that there was an HG+ school in our area (preferably a public school!) because I think ds6 would be *best* suited in such an environment. Short of that ... it's an uphill battle to make ensure that he's working at his max potential at school, and getting all the benefits -- ie, real peers -- that ND kids get out of school. And honestly, he's the happiest kid he can be when he's being really, really challenged at school -- he told me recently that he likes his school because he learns "hard math" there.

Ideally, it seems that gifted kids would work with other equally gifted kids that can inspire and challenge them to do their best. Unfortunately, this is the most "radical" gifted ed approach, and the hardest sell to the Powers That Be. Others, with kids who are radically accelerated, please tell me that I'm wrong! Do you think your child is best served in their placement with older kids, or do you think a class-worth of equally (or near equally) GT kids would be better, even if that class consisted of only two or three kids?

Can you tell I'm just a *little* jaded here?

Originally Posted by Mia

It is nebulous, at least until goals for a given year are set. And those goals may not/probably won't reach high enough for an HG+ child. But they would at least guarantee *some* new material every single year. That's more than HG+ kids get now.

I completely agree that anything but an individualized education is a compromise. (Frankly, it is even for ND kids!) But we have a system, and if we're going to try to improve it and not just chuck it completely, then I think we have to ask, what's the best way to include GT kids? What's the best way to be sure that they matter to teachers, that teachers actually feel the need to teach them? I think we *have* to start from there or else there's no point in even having this conversation.

I'm arguing that requiring that kids make at least a year's worth of progress from where they start is the best way I've heard.

I'm sure open to other ideas!

I think it also pays to consider the fact that this system would improve the educational lot for the high-average and MG kids, probably significantly. There's a lot of value there, I think...