Andy wonders if he’s being naive again to think that a rise in test scores is a bad thing. At issue is the new Center on Education Policy report which shows that, in most states, scores are up at all three of NCLB’s “performance levels”: basic, proficient, and advanced.

Now, before I answer Andy’s question (in the affirmative of course!), let me state that the inquiry CEP pursued is a worthwhile one, and its researchers seem to have approached it responsibly—with some important caveats (see below).

Flypaper readers know that we at Fordham are also interested in knowing whether students at all levels of performance—and particularly at the highest levels—are making gains under NCLB. The fear is that the focus on getting “bubble kids” over the “proficient” bar might lead schools to ignore kids who are well below or above it. (The sociologist formerly known as Eduwonkette thinks this sort of triage is happening in DC.)

We addressed this question a year ago in our major report, High Achieving Students in the Era of No Child Left Behind. In it, Tom Loveless examined NAEP results at the 10th and 90th percentiles, and found the low-performers making big gains and the high-performers making minimal ones. (His exact phrase for the progress of the high-performers was “languid.”) Helpfully, he also provided a literature review of the handful of other studies that have looked at this “triage” question (i.e., is there evidence that schools are focusing on the bubble kids to the detriment of others?). Here’s how he summed it up (see pages 14-15):

These three studies yield no clear conclusion as to whether NCLB-style accountability encourages educational triage. In particular, it is unclear how high achievers fare under such systems. They gained (Springer), lost (Reback), and experienced mixed results (Neal and Schanzenbach).

Add Loveless’s study, and this new one from CEP, to the mix, and the take-away is the same: no clear conclusion.

So why did Tom find “languid” progress for high-achievers while CEP found “gains in 71% of the trend lines at the advanced level and declines in 23%”? (Keep in mind, though, that the gains were even more pronounced at the proficient level.) Here are a few thoughts—and the caveats to keep in mind.

First, there’s plenty of reason to believe that even the “advanced” level set by many states is rather low. Since these tests are designed to get a very accurate read at the “proficient” level—and since that level is set so ridiculously low by most states—it’s unlikely that the advanced level is high enough to accurately measure our top students. They simply max out on the tests, getting virtually all of the questions right. So the progress made at the advanced level could be real, but might be an indicator of how above-average students are doing, not our highest-performers. Contrast this to the Loveless study, which used NAEP (whose range goes much higher), and which examined the top ten percent of students.

And second, in the CEP report, a trend line could be positive without students making very strong gains. This would be consistent with Tom’s findings, in that high-achievers made gains, but they were “languid.”

So here’s my bottom line: It’s still likely that lots of schools are engaging in triage and focusing on the bubble kids. These kids tend to be low-performers, since the proficiency bar itself is set so low in most states. However, a stronger focus on core reading and math skills probably does “lift all boats.” And furthermore, the affluent suburban schools with the bulk of the highest-performing students probably don’t engage in as much of this triage, because their students are going to pass the state tests no matter what. Faced with different pressures and incentives, they focus on getting more of their kids to the advanced level. (We see this in the Washington suburbs.) So if you’re affluent and attend a homogenous school in the suburbs, you’re probably not subjected to NCLB’s downsides. But if you’re poor and high achieving, and attend a school with lots of low-performing kids, well, you are flat out of luck.

Andy, still optimistic?

Apparently there’s a book being released next year about giftedness and EducationNews.org recently interviewed the author of the book’s foreword— Carol S. Dweck, Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. Dweck tells us:

The essence of this book is that giftedness and talent are much more multi-faceted than we ever realized. They can grow in different children in different ways, under different circumstances, and at different ages. Talent is not simply something that a child is born with and that blossoms naturally throughout life.

This is crucial because it changes the whole enterprise. The enterprise used to be one of measuring and identifying giftedness—deciding who was gifted and who was not. Now, the enterprise is one of fostering giftedness and talent-creating the conditions in which it will flourish for as many children as possible.

Ah yes—nature vs. nurture. The debate continues. Still, I found what Dweck had to say quite interesting. Essentially, she said there are ways that a child who’s gifted early-on may lose that edge. A child may initially find work extremely easy, fail to develop good work habits and stumble later on when work becomes more difficult. Or, a child who’s repeatedly told he or she is gifted/extremely intelligent may become so invested in that label that he or she may become afraid to take on challenges (”What if I mess up and don’t look gifted?”). And, some potentially gifted children may not see their gifts come to fruition if they don’t have encouragement and opportunities, she said.

Fordham of course did its own study on gifted children earlier this year...though ours was a bit different in that it examined the academic progress of gifted students in the era of No Child Left Behind.

Photograph by mysza831 on Flickr

Introducing Monday’s uber-wonk special: Tom Loveless vs. Gregory Camilli on high-achieving students in the era of NCLB! This one has it all: “straw man” accusations; differing interpretations of NAEP; and, rest assured, a happy ending on “common ground.”

Want to enjoy all the action? Start by reading Tom Loveless’s report on high-achieving students, then peruse Gregory Camilli’s review of said study for the union-funded Think Tank Review Project, then enjoy Loveless’s response.

I’ve come to admire the anonymous edu-blogger Eduwonkette, what with her skillful use of Photoshop, fearless questioning of the high and mighty, and, yes, lavish attention and fun she heaps on us here at Fordham.* But I’ve got to call her out on this morning’s post about New York City’s achievement gap.

My beef isn’t about NYC in particular but her analysis of the achievement gap in general. (An analysis that is strikingly similar to Charles Murray’s, by the way.) She writes:

Proficiency rates, or the percentage of students passing a test, are often used to measure achievement gaps. For example, if 90% of white students passed a test and 65% of black students did, some observers will say that the achievement gap is “25 points.” Proficiency is a misleading and inaccurate way to measure achievement gaps. Primarily, the problem is that we cannot differentiate between students who just made it over the proficiency bar and those who scored well above it. Proficiency rates can increase substantially by moving a small number of kids up a few points—just enough to clear the cut score. But black and Hispanic students may still lag far behind their peers even as their proficiency rates increase.... The most valid way to measure gaps between groups is to compare the test score distributions of the groups. What this means is that we compare average scale scores as well as differences between low-scoring white/Asian and Hispanic/black students (i.e. students scoring at the 10th percentile of their respective groups) and differences between high-scoring students (i.e. students scoring at the 90th percentile of their respective groups).

This is true, as far as it goes, if your goal is to create a world whereby all differences between racial or economic groups disappear. Maybe that’s what some organizations are seeking. But I think that objective is rather naïve and not particularly helpful. As Jay Mathews explains, working toward that outcome leads you to root against the progress of white and affluent students, because every gain they make offsets your attempt to “close the gap.” Mathews says “all children deserve a chance to climb as high as they can,” and surely he’s right.

Eduwonkette’s analysis also stands if “proficiency” has no meaning—if it’s just an arbitrary bar, and a low one at that. And yes, in many states, that’s exactly what it is. But let’s imagine that a state sets a standard for proficiency that actually means something—say, that a student is on track to be college- and workforce-ready by the time he or she graduates high school. Then closing, or at least narrowing, the “achievement gap” at the proficiency level is a worthwhile objective, for it would mean that we are succeeding in getting more students to that real-world standard. Since most white and affluent students are already at that standard (or close to it), the only way to narrow the gap would be to help more poor and minority students become college and work-ready. That’s a goal we can all get behind.

There are plenty of reasons to push back against the Bloomberg/Klein hype, but arguing that closing the “proficiency gap” doesn’t matter isn’t one of them.

* And so, as the senior pooh-ba on this blog (let’s face it, Checker isn’t posting a whole lot these days), I decree that Eduwonkette shall now be included among the “Flyest of the Fly.” (See sidebar.)

Want to be the best public school in the nation? Banish all those who do not hold at least a B average.

That’s the impression I get from reading Karin Chenoweth’s post about Fordham’s high-achieving students study. First she spins our findings in as positive a light as possible (after all, No Child Left Behind was Ed Trust’s baby, and this spin fits its preferred “narrative”):

While the highest performing students in the county are making steady gains, the lowest performing students are improving even faster in math and early reading. This, even though most teachers say that the amount of attention that high-performing students receive in school has stayed the same or increased.... Loveless’s analysis indicates that we may have finally figured out some things about how to ensure that students who struggle master the basics of reading and math while pushing up the performance of those who easily master the basics. He provides some deeply disturbing findings about eighth-grade reading, which I’ll get to in a minute, but fourth- and eighth-grade math and fourth-grade reading show gains at both the top and bottom of the achievement scale, with the bottom showing the most gains.

Then she gets snarky:

You would think these findings would be cause for major celebration and some well-deserved thanks to elementary school teachers and middle school math teachers who have stepped up to the plate and delivered some solid results—results that we as a nation demanded. But, perhaps because Loveless’s sober analysis of test score data was accompanied by a rather silly, pity-the-poor-little gifted-children introduction by Chester A. [sic] Finn and Michael Petrilli of the Fordham Foundation, some press accounts said the report showed a “Robin Hood effect.” This, even though Loveless explicitly rejected that idea, saying, “The concern about a Robin Hood effect, in which students at the bottom of the achievement distribution make gains at the expense of high achievers, is not substantiated by NAEP data.”

“Pity-the-poor-little gifted-children”? Is it really considered okay for an estimable civil rights group to spout such condescension toward millions of minors? Education Trust in general and Chenoweth in specific are to be lauded for performing plenty of valuable services—among them showing that low-income kids can achieve at high levels—but this is outrageous. Consider what might happen if Fordham or Cato or Heritage complained that Education Trust’s reports present a “pity-the-poor-little poor children” narrative. The Left would scream!

But you be the judge. Here’s the heart of what Checker and I wrote in our “silly” introduction to the study:

No Child Left Behind appears to be meeting its objectives: narrowing achievement gaps from the bottom up. Some may declare this to be a wonderful accomplishment: the performance of low-achieving students is rising, while those at the top aren’t losing ground. But is that outcome good enough for a great nation? If we want to compete in a global economy, don’t we need all our young people—including our highest achievers—to make steady progress too? And if so, isn’t our current approach to standards-based reform in need of a make-over?

And this:

Let’s bring some honesty to this debate. How should we define “justice” in America’s public education system? Does it mean doing everything to bring up the performance of low-achieving students, or does it mean helping all students—rich and poor, black and white, low and high achieving—equally? Count us with the teachers on this one. If the United States is to compete with the rest of the globe, and, more crassly, if No Child Left Behind is to survive politically, then no students, even those at the top, can have their needs “left behind.”

Obviously Education Trust doesn’t want our country even to have this conversation, for it raises questions about its party line that “closing the achievement gap” should be the only objective our education system worries about. Education wonks across the ideological spectrum have been genuflecting at this altar for the better part of a decade. But this conversation is coming, like it or not, because even Education Trust can’t keep a lid on it. Yes, let’s keep the progress going for low-achieving students. But let’s also pity the “poor little gifted children” who have to sit in classrooms bored all day because Ed Trust thinks getting low-income and minority kids to “proficient” is the only thing that matters. Those gifted kids are, well, kids, and their futures matter, too.

That’s what Mona Charen argues in this National Review Online piece,* using No Child Left Behind as Exhibit A. Much to his dismay, they don’t seem to love him back.

* Shameless plug alert: She mentions Fordham’s recent high-achieving students study, too.

Why don’t we round up some Los Angeles high school students, put them in a room together, and ask them to pontificate about why Asian students do better academically than Latino students? I’m sure what they say will be revelatory; I’m sure we’re not wasting their time and filling their heads with nonsense.

Columnist Jay Mathews writes in today’s Washington Post about Fordham’s latest report, High-Achieving Students in the Era of No Child Left Behind.

Here’s a teaser:

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.

Here’s more on TJ, i.e, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, in Fairfax County, Virginia.

As a fellow insect-themed edu-blog, we feel a certain kinship with our friends at BoardBuzz, produced by the National School Boards Association. But the Buzzers went bust with their analysis of our recent high-achieving students study. Let’s tackle their misstatements, one by one:

Contrary to the thinking that high achieving students have been left behind, the report actually found that high achieving students (those scoring in the top 10 percent on NAEP) have been making similar gains on NAEP over the past 20 years. BoardBuzz hardly thinks that’s being left behind. On the other hand, low achieving students (those scoring in the bottom 10 percent) have been making 4 times as many gains on NAEP since NCLB was enacted compare to before.

Ah, watch those apples-to-organges comparisons, NSBA. Yes, if you go back to the early 1990s, the progress of low and high achievers looks roughly the same, at least in some subject-grade combinations. But upon closer inspection the story is very different. Basically the 90s were quite good for high achievers (particularly in states without accountability systems); the post-2000 years have been quite good for low achievers (perhaps due to NCLB). The story since 2000, though, is straightforward: anemic gains at the top versus dramatic gains at the bottom. No, our top students aren’t doing worse, but is their “languid” progress (Tom Loveless’s word) good enough in today’s competitive world?

Then the Buzzers say:

If you had listened to Fordham you would think the achievement of high achieving students remained flat or even declined but this simply is not the case. Would we all like to see greater gains from all our students? Of course. There is always room for improvement, but that does not mean that high performers have been neglected.

But anyone who reads our report, or even our summary in last week’s Gadfly, will encounter statements like this: “The performance of high achievers is unimpressive at best. Their scores haven’t fallen, mind you. But neither have they risen much.” So I’m not sure who the Buzzers are “listening” to. Regardless, what we learn from our national teacher survey (part of the study) is that teachers are neglecting their top students, and feel guilty about it. I understand why, institutionally, the NSBA wants to engage in happy talk about how well the public schools are doing, but we need to face these tough choices in an honest way. School boards should know that lots of teachers feel pressure to spend all of their time on the lowest-performing students and that high achievers aren’t getting the attention they deserve. That needs fixing, pronto.

Finally,

BoardBuzz has heard a lot that schools have been forced to focus on only those students right below or above proficiency, so called bubble kids, at the expense of their low and high performing students to raise their proficiency rates since high achievers would reach proficiency anyway and low achievers weren’t likely to. Fortunately the report shows that this appears to be untrue.

Well, not so fast. Our Proficiency Illusion report from last year found that most states are defining “proficiency” as the 20th or 30th percentile nationally in reading and math. Several states aim even lower—around the 10th percentile. So the lowest-achieving students might be the “bubble kids,” since state standards are set so embarrassingly low.

And with that, I’m going to take a break—not just from the high-achieving students issue, but from education policy. See you on July 7^th.

Video footage from the panel discussion of Fordham’s recent report, High-Achieving Students in the Era of No Child Left Behind, is now online for your viewing pleasure:

High-Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB from Education Gadfly on Vimeo.

5:30 - Tom Loveless, Brookings Institution
19:05 - Steve Farkas, Farkas Duffett Research Group
33:25 - Josh Wyner, Jack Kent Cooke Foundation
41:15 - Ross Wiener, Education Trust
48:30 - Question & Answer

Download:
Tom Loveless’s slideshow
Steve Farkas’s slideshow

Speaker bios

We assiduously avoided putting a nerdy kid on the cover of our high-achieving students report. (We skipped the nerdy goggles too.) But now I’m thinking that pictures of any of these nerds would have made nice cover art, too (well, save for the one of Al Gore).

Fordham hosted a panel event this morning about our recent report, High-Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB. (Video will be available shortly.) As the moderator I’m biased, but I thought it was a great conversation among study authors Tom Loveless and Steve Farkas and respondents Josh Wyner (of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation) and Ross Wiener (of Education Trust).

Among the more contentious points of debate was whether our teachers have to choose between focusing on their low achievers or their high achievers, or whether through the magic of “differentiated instruction” they can reach everybody exactly where they are. (I think by the end there was almost-unanimous support for grouping students by ability—”the red birds and the blue birds”—as a way to solve this riddle.)

But the heart of the discussion was whether “closing achievement gaps” should be the only objective of our education system. Josh, for example, made an eloquent plea for greater attention for high-achieving students who are also poor, and suggested that a new NCLB focus on closing the “advanced achievement gap” along with the “proficiency gap.” That’s fine, but doesn’t that still leave out most of the nation’s high achievers who, let’s be honest, aren’t poor? Don’t we care about them too? Or do we revert to the argument that “affluent gifted kids will take care of themselves”?

This is a big decision. Maybe, on equity grounds, it’s right to focus almost obsessively on the education of poor and minority students, particularly because they, on average, are so, so far behind everyone else. But taken too far, that approach transforms public education into a welfare program. And just as turning Social Security into a program for the poor would erode public support, so too would doing the same for public schools. Are some policy advocates begging middle-class families to pull their students out of public schools?

Here’s a simple principle: at the least, schools should be expected to help all students make a year’s worth of progress over the course of a year—even students that start school in September two or three grade levels above. And we should reserve our greatest praise (and perhaps rewards) for schools that accelerate the progress of all of their students and help each one reach his or her full potential. And that principle should apply to all of our children, regardless of the color of their skin, the size of their parents’ pocketbook, or their zip code. Anything else strikes me as unfair, unkind—and politically unsustainable.

Our friend Greg Forster wrote a post last week about Checker’s and my National Review Online essay in which we report on the findings of Fordham’s high-achieving students study and argue that “excellence” (defined as the progress of our top students) is being sacrificed for “equality” (defined as the progress of our lowest-performing students or, in today’s parlance, “narrowing the achievement gap”). Greg thinks our evidence doesn’t back up our argument:

If the kids at the bottom are doing better while the kids at the top stay the same, is the whole population getting more excellent or less excellent?

Is the whole population getting “more excellent”? No, the whole population is making incremental progress. That’s surely good. But excellence is something else entirely. According to Webster’s, it’s the quality of being “superior, eminently good, first-class.”

Greg’s definition equates “excellence” with a narrowing of the achievement gap. That’s breathtakingly radical. Who knew that Greg had become such a lefty!

Update: My lefty friend Greg now calls me elitist.

The Des Moines Register weighs in on Fordham’s high-achieving students study and gets it exactly right:

Nicholas Colangelo, director of the Belin-Blank Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development at the University of Iowa, said revisions of the No Child law should provide more help to students at the high end and look at how to better measure their progress.

“One of the problems with No Child Left Behind is that it...made the [high-achieving] students invisible. This research is just bringing that out,” Colangelo said. “The answer is that we do not have the luxury of not having a better balance. We can’t have national policy on education that so strongly focuses on one population of students and pretty much ignores the other. What happens then is there is going to be frustration, and people are going to feel that public schools are not the place for high-ability students. I don’t see where the nation gains.”

Helping students across the board make academic gains is critical. The national conversation on education should pay more attention to this. It’s foolish to waste the potential of any American youngster.

Chad Adelman, Education Sector’s new policy associate, digs into our high-achieving students study and thinks he’s found a smoking gun. In particular, he has a beef with us looking at National Assessment of Educational Progress scores since 2000, instead of 2003:

But No Child wasn’t signed into law until January 2002. The first NAEP tests measuring its true impacts could not have been until 2003, represented by the dotted line.

When we make this correction, the claims in the report do not seem to stand up as well. The lower tenth of performers made gains throughout the chart, but especially from 2000 to 2003, where they gained 13 points to their high achieving peers’ six. Notably, this accounts for almost all the gain claimed in the Fordham report.

Chad, you’re right, though using 2003 as the starting point—more than a year after the law’s enactment—isn’t perfect either. Tom Loveless, author of our NAEP study, discusses this issue at length (see pages 18-20):

Another important consideration concerning time intervals should also now be apparent from examining the NAEP data. Three grade-subject combinations exhibit a consistent pattern, a straightforward story of narrowing gaps during the NCLB era—mostly the result of sharp gains by low-achieving students from 2000 to 2002 or from 2000 to 2003. But whether these years belong in the NCLB era is debatable. The starting point matters. Using the NAEP test immediately before NCLB’s passage as a baseline, as this study does, includes growth that may have nothing to do with NCLB. Selecting a later date—2003, for example—and arguing that the act’s accountability provisions could not have been implemented before then would lead to the conclusion that growth was much less during the NCLB era (although still statistically significant, as shown in appendix A), and that the gaps between low and high achievers were essentially unchanged. But it would also omit influence that NCLB may have had on NAEP scores during the debate and early implementation of the legislation.

Neal and Schanzenbach provide an example. In the fall of 2001, “with the passage of NCLB looming on the horizon,” the state of Illinois placed hundreds of schools on a watch list and declared that future state testing would be high stakes. If such actions influenced educators’ behavior and students’ test scores, an “NCLB effect” may have been registered in 2002. The bottom line is that there is no clear boundary between pre- and post-NCLB periods and no perfect way to delineate the NCLB era using the NAEP test years. Critics and defenders of NCLB alike can (and do) exploit this ambiguity to their advantage. The fairest approach is to point out the large gains in NAEP scores in the period around 1998-2003 and acknowledge that NCLB’s association with these gains is unknown.

P.S. Readers can see the long-term trends for high-achieving students by viewing the foreword to the report, where they are presented since the 1990s. As we wrote, “Looking at long-term NAEP trends for the top 10 percent, one spots a steady line inching ever-so-slowly upward from the early 1990s to today. Enter NCLB, and nothing changes. It’s ‘benign neglect’ in pictures.”

Checker and Mike write on National Review Online today about Fordham’s latest report, High-Achieving Students in the Era of No Child Left Behind.

I’ve been enjoying the print media’s and blogosphere’s reactions to our new report, High-Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB. Most of the commentary is entirely predictable. For instance, the Education Trust expresses discomfort with us even raising the issue. From this morning’s New York Times story:

Amy Wilkins, a vice president at Education Trust, which lobbies for policies to help close the achievement gap, said the gains by low achievers should be applauded. “My concern is that this report makes it seem like we have to choose between seeking equity and excellence,” she said. “We need to strive for both.”

Susan Traiman, the Business Roundtable’s education policy director, goes a bit further:

We’re producing progress at the bottom, and we need to maintain that,” Ms. Traiman said, “but we need to ratchet up the performance of students at every achievement level if we’re going to be competitive.”

That’s exactly right. But the award for truth-telling goes to Eduwonk Andy, who acknowledges that educators, at least, have to make difficult choices about how to allocate their time and attention.

There is also a belief that schools can do everything at once: That they can close achievement gaps, raise overall achievement, stretch high performing students and help struggling ones all at the same time. As Rick Hess and I wrote in PDK in 2007 all of these pressures create an untenable situation for educators.

We put this directly to the teachers by asking them, when deciding how they spend their one-on-one time, which students they pick. Overwhelmingly, it’s the low achievers:

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.

But teachers will still have to decide how to spend their time and attention. Right now, they are choosing to spend it on the low achievers, which is fine with Andy. I’d vote for a more “equitable” use of teachers’ time—giving it equally to all students, regardless of prior achievement. (And grouping students by ability, instead of age, would help a lot, and teachers think so too, according to our survey.) And the Education Trust would rather us shut up about this whole debate, because they know it will make parents angry to know that their children might be getting ignored due to NCLB’s incentives. But it’s a debate we should have, out in the open, rather than pretending that an obsession with closing the achievement gap comes without any costs.

Mike and Christina discuss Fordham’s new report on how high-achievers have fared as educators have turned their focus toward closing the achievement gap.