That's the question posed by Fordham's latest report, High Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB. (Check out the full report or the one-page summary.) It contains two separate studies examining the status of high-achieving students in the No Child Left Behind era. The first, by Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless,??concludes that the nation's top pupils have "languished" academically while the lowest-performing youngsters have gained dramatically. The second, by the Farkas Duffett Research Group,??finds that most teachers feel pressure to focus primarily on their lowest-achieving students and neglect the high achievers, even though this offends their sense of fairness. Both studies make clear that if we want our top achievers to make progress, too, we'll need to rethink NCLB's accountability measures.
The report's getting lots of attention in the media; see coverage from the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Washington Times, Education Week, and Chronicle of Higher Education.
