Published Online: June 18, 2008Top Students Said to Stagnate Under NCLBBy Debra ViaderoWhile the nation’s poorest-performing students havemade academic progress under the federal No Child LeftBehind Act, the brightest students appear to belanguishing for lack of attention, according to a reportreleased today by a Washington think tank.“People have been complaining ever since NCLB passedthat focusing resources on the bottom students wouldcome at the expense of high-achieving students,” saidTom Loveless, one of the authors of the report. “Therehasn’t been any Robin Hood effect, but the high achievershaven’t been gaining, either.”Titled “High-Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB,” the report from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundationdraws on national test-score data and results from anationwide survey of 900 public school teachers in grades 3-12 to paint a portrait of a generation ofhigh achievers left to fend for themselves as schools and teachers shift their time and resourcestoward educational strategies aimed more at bringing the bottom up than on raising achievement forall children.The data show, for instance, that from 2000 to 2007, the scores of the top 10 percent of studentsessentially held steady on National Assessment of Educational Progress tests in reading and math. Thescores for the bottom 10 percent of students, meanwhile, rose by 18 points on the 4th grade readingtest and 13 points in 8th grade math—the equivalent of about a year’s worth of learning by Mr.Loveless’ calculations. (One exception to that pattern was in 8th grade reading, where low-achievingstudents' scores declined and the achievement gap widened slightly.)What’s difficult to tell is whether the disparity was caused by the federal law or whether it reflectslonger-term educational trends. The legislation, which was signed into law in 2002, imposesconsequences on schools for failing to improve the scores of low-achieving students.“We would make the argument that NCLB is linked to state standards, and some state standards arenot terribly high, so maybe one of the problems for the high-achieving kids is that there isn’t enoughstretch for them,” said Amy Wilkins, the vice president for governmental affairs and communicationsfor the Education Trust, a Washington-based group that promotes educational equity and is supportiveof the federal law.Roots in the 1990sA handful of studies in recent years have examined the 6-year-old law’s impact on students who areacademically struggling, on the “bubble kids” who fall just below passing levels on state tests, and onpoor and minority students. Yet few—if any—have focused on academically advanced students.The new report combines findings from the first two of five planned reports from the FordhamEducation Week: Top Students Said to Stagnate Under NCLB http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/07/16/43achievers_web.h27.ht...1 of 3 1/3/2009 8:53 AMFoundation on the educational status of children at the high end of the academic spectrum. TheWashington-based research organization advocates high academic standards and is a prominentsupporter of charter schools.To some extent, the narrowing of the achievement gap that occurred in the post-NCLB years had itsstart in the 1990s, according to Mr. Loveless, who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution anddirector of its Brown Center on Education Policy. During those years, the gains made by low-achievingstudents outpaced those of top achievers and then began to accelerate after 2000.The gains for low achievers were most pronounced, however, in states that had begun to put in placeaccountability systems similar to that of NCLB’s. In those states, Mr. Loveless found, test scoresimproved for the bottom 10 percent of students at a faster clip than they did for the top 10 percent.The academic gains for the latter group began to slow after states imposed new high-stakes testingsystems.“We can’t say that NCLB ‘caused’ the achievement of the nation’s top students to stagnate, any morethan it ‘caused’ the achievement of our lowest-performing students to rise dramatically,” the reportsays. “All we know is that the acceleration in achievement gains by low-performing students isassociated with the introduction of NCLB (and, earlier, with state accountability systems).”Teachers’ TakeAccording to results from surveys and focus-group interviews conducted as part of the study, teachersseemed to agree that the federal law had negative consequences for their best-performing students.Eighty-one percent of teachers, for example, said low-achieving students are most likely to getone-on-one attention from teachers, while only 5 percent named advanced students as the group thatdrew the most individual attention.Likewise, 73 percent of teachers agreed that “too often, the brightest students are bored andunderchallenged in school.”More than three-quarters of teachers—77 percent—agreed that “getting underachieving students toreach ‘proficiency’ has become so important that the needs of advanced students take a back seat.”“I had expected public school teachers to say that it was far more important to raise the achievementof low-performing kids, and they said equity means that no group of students should be neglected,”said Steve Farkas, the president of the New York City-based Farkas Duffett Research Group and theco-author of that part of the report.Teachers also expressed concern about being inadequately trained to teach advanced students or todifferentiate their instruction so that all students make progress in classrooms with students of mixedacademic abilities.Nancy Green, the executive director of the Washington-based National Association for Gifted Children,said the findings fit with the anecdotal reports that she gets from teachers and parents of giftedchildren.“You get what you measure,” she said. “Given that we’re getting beaten over the head over issues ofthe U.S.’s [economic] competitiveness now, we’re wondering how long it will be before policymakersmake the connection between the needs of gifted kids and national competitiveness.”The top-ranking students tended, for the most part, to be white students from the suburbs. But Mr.Loveless also analyzed data on the small subgroups of African-American, Hispanic, and low-incomeEducation Week: Top Students Said to Stagnate Under NCLB http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/07/16/43achievers_web.h27.ht...2