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.
