The intense efforts of No Child Left Behind to bring the performance of the nation’s worst students from unacceptable to adequate may be the same force stopping the movement of its brightest students from excellent to extraordinary, according to a report released Wednesday by a Washington-based educational research group.
Since 2000, the start of the No Child Left Behind era, researchers from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute found test scores for students in the lowest 10 percent soared, while scores for their peers in the top 10 percent “languished.”
On the national standardized reading test for fourth-graders, for example, that means scores for the lowest jumped by 16 points in seven years, while those for the smartest kids ticked up only by three points, despite room on the test for further growth.
The report also found that 78 percent ofteachers nationwide agreed that getting low-performing students to do better “has become so important that the needs of advanced students take a back seat.”
“There are millions of kids out there bored to tears because they’re not being challenged,” said Michael Petrilli, Fordham Institute’s vice president.
Petrilli commended the law’s effectiveness in moving toward one of its goals: the elimination of the achievement gap. “But it raises the question of whether or not that goal should be the only goal. In a competitive world, the question is whether the languid growth of our best and brightest students is good enough.”
Eric Marx, an active parent of a gifted student in Montgomery County schools, said it’s not. And in Montgomery County, he said, the most adversely affected high achievers are in the district’s schools that face the greatest challenge each year in meeting the law’s standards.
“In more affluent schools, it’s much less of an issue because they know they’ll meet [the standards],” Marx said, explaining the best schools are able to put more resources toward the brightest kids. The district claims all students are provided with a curriculum that reaches higher than the mandates of the law.
“But in schools that have serious worries [about meeting the standards],” Marx said, the standards are “their number one, two and three focus, and everything else is a luxury.”
