The Excellence Gap: A New Version of the Achievement Gap

February 22nd, 2010 By: Diane Trim in Articles, School Turnaround, Teachers' Corner

Educators should give themselves a pat on the back: the achievement gap is narrowing. More kids are passing standardized tests and more schools are meeting NCLB’s requirements. That’s a huge achievement for teachers and schools, but most of all, it’s a huge achievement for the students themselves.

Except, along the way, we’ve forgotten some kids.

We’re doing well at the middle and that’s great, but the demographics have remained almost unchanged for students who excelled in education standards like reading and math.

The Excellence Gap. According to a study from the Center for Evaluation & Education Policy, “As measured by the percentage of students scoring at the advanced level on the NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress], the excellence gap has been stable or growing for each type of demographic group (gender, ELL, race, and free lunch eligibility).”

But those gains are either statistically very small (less than one percent gains) or the disadvantaged groups’ scores have been stagnant, the study’s authors wrote. While the disadvantaged students’ scores remained the same, those of their advantaged peers rose.

Anecdotally, it seems that the strides we’ve made to decrease the achievement gap among the lower-scoring students would help improve all students’ scores. However, that’s not the case.

The authors wrote that, “[…] the act of helping underrepresented students trying to reach basic competence by itself seems unrelated to the scores of their peers at higher levels of achievement.”

Inequity among G/T Offerings. Part of the problem, the report’s authors wrote, is that gifted education programs are spotty. The federal government doesn’t fund gifted education, so it’s up to the states to budget for the programs. So, there’s no consistency in gifted education from state to state and even from school to school.

Wealthier school districts are able to offer more gifted education programs to their students, but many districts are cutting their offerings, their teaching positions, and gifted programming.

“Poorer districts, which often have greater Black, Hispanic, and ELL populations, would be unable to provide their students with the same opportunities [as affluent districts],” the report’s authors wrote.

Black and White students enter kindergarten with essentially the same reading and math capabilities, the authors wrote. Over the years, Black students fall behind the White students. This gap grows even faster for the Black students who had initially high math and reading scores. Fewer school resources, fewer enrichment activities, and less able teachers in the disadvantaged schools might be the factors that hold these students back.

How Can We Bridge the Excellence Gap? The report’s authors recommend more studies that focus specifically on the excellence gap and not just on the NCLB’s minimal competency requirements.

They also recommend:

• Making the excellence gap a national and state priority.
• Addressing both minimal competency and excellence at the same time.
• Set targets to close the excellence gap.

The excellence gap didn’t begin with NCLB, the authors wrote, but our current focus on minimum competency isn’t the way to grow our country’s scientists, engineers, and other highly skilled workers.

“[…] continuing to pretend that a nearly complete disregard of high achievement is permissible, especially among underperforming subgroups, is a formula for a mediocre K-12 education system and long-term economic decline,” the authors wrote.

Reference:

Plucker, J.A., Burroughs, N., and Song, R. (2009) Mind the (Other) Gap! The Growing Excellence Gap in K-12 Education.” Center for Evaluation & Education Policy. http://ceep.indiana.edu/mindthegap/ Accessed 2/15/10.

Tags: achievement, achievement gap, NCLB, standardized test