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.
