Top students get spotlight in attempt to close ‘gap’
Consider two fifth-graders. One struggles with math, reads below grade level and has trouble turning thoughts into paragraphs. The other is a high achiever who aces tests and thinks the homework her teacher assigns is too easy.
Education reformers have focused their efforts for years on the first student, and many have been wary of creating separate, more advanced classrooms for the second. Given the United States’ ugly history of denying certain groups access to a rigorous education, why devote resources to students who presumably already do well in school, when there are so many others who are behind?
Indeed, closing the “achievement gap,” a phrase popularized by researchers in the 1960s, has been the focus of much education policy for decades. The goal has been to bring the academic performance of struggling students from lowincome backgrounds, many of them black or Hispanic, up to the average level of their middle-class or more privileged peers.
Now, with test-score gaps narrowing but remaining stubbornly persistent after years of efforts, some in the education field are taking a fresh look at programs for advanced students that once made them uneasy, driven by the same desire to help historically disadvantaged groups. They are concerned not just with the achievement gap, measured by average performance, but the “excellence gap”: They hope to get more students from diverse backgrounds to perform at elite levels.
“Something started to change culturally in this country,” said Jonathan Plucker, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education and one of the researchers who coined the term excellence gap. “Just to even talk about bright students was suddenly much more palatable to people,” he said.
That discussion has recently led to high-profile education policy moves. In New York earlier this month, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that he would change the admissions process for eight of the city’s most competitive specialized high schools, including Stuyvesant and the Bronx High School of Science, to help more black and Latino students win admission. Two weeks later, the University of Chicago became the first top research university to make SAT or ACT exam scores optional rather than mandatory for admission, part of a suite of measures meant to bring in more low-income students, who tend to score less well on those tests.
Over the past two years, state legislatures in Washington, Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey and Alabama have passed bills intended to finance or improve opportunities for high-achieving students, or to make accelerated programs more diverse. And in March, the U.S. Department of Education announced that it would give priority to grant applications from states and localities that seek to expand and diversify their programs for gifted and talented students.
The law that governs federal education policy, the Every Student Succeeds Act, signed by President Barack Obama in 2015, requires states to track and report the demographic breakdown of high-performing students, in order to help identify gaps. That was not required by the previous law, the No Child Left Behind Act.
Under that law, “the whole system was really designed to focus on minimum competency,” Plucker said. About four years ago, “we started to see a subtle shift” toward focusing on high-ability students.
The change occurred, in part, because No Child Left Behind’s mandate to make all children “proficient,” as measured by standardized tests, resulted in more time spent on test preparation in American schools. Teachers and parents widely disliked that push.