1998 was a rambunctious year, as both Google and iMac arrived, Bill and Monica made headlines, and Seinfeld ended with a widely-panned finale. It was also the year that we at Fordham published our very first report on advanced education (née “gifted & talented”). It dealt with tracking and ability grouping and was authored by the estimable Tom Loveless.
Since then, we’ve published fourteen other reports or books on how to improve education for America’s high achievers. Suffice to say, we’ve been among a wee group of reformers interested in that topic over the last twenty-five years. Wee because too many assume that advanced education is about increasing privileges for the already advantaged, rather than identifying and maximizing the strengths of every student—including poor kids and kids of color with potential for high academic achievement.
This disregard has resulted in serious neglect of a vital student subgroup, with future national repercussions for weakened, less diverse leadership and less innovation, progress, and economic growth. More pragmatically, it has also resulted in a lack of informative research for the field of advanced education.
Fordham’s latest report, The Broken Pipeline: Advanced Education Policies at the Local Level—our sweet sixteenth in this realm, if you will—aims to address just one of many unknowns: whether districts across the nation have adopted policies and programs to identify, support, and cultivate the talents of all students capable of tackling advanced-level work.
Our National Research Director, Adam Tyner, was keen to conduct this investigation, having previously completed research on gifted education in high-poverty schools. Adam also participated in The National Working Group on Advanced Education, leading to last year’s release of dozens of recommendations to aid state and local officials in developing a continuum of advanced learning opportunities across K–12.
The key aim of the current project was to determine whether districts have in place policies that align to the National Working Group’s recommendations. Thus, from May through October 2023, we surveyed a random sample of district and charter school administrators in charge of advanced education. Nearly 600 responded, and using stratified weighting, we adjusted the results to be representative of large and medium districts and charter school organizations, which together educate 90 percent of public-school students. So to what extent have districts adopted smart approaches to advanced education? To some extent, we discovered, but not nearly enough.
Adam aggregated the policies recommended by the Working Group such that a district (or charter network) could earn a total of 1,000 points. The results showed that the typical (median) district earned less than half of the possible points (485 out of 1,000), a majority earned 350 to 600 points, and only one-fourth of districts earned more than 600 points. Were the rubric translated into a traditional A–F scale, three-fourths of the districts and charter networks would flunk. That leaves a lot of room for improvement.
Still, we were pleasantly surprised to discover that it’s quite common for districts to universally screen students for advanced education services based on their performance on standardized assessments. Specifically, more than three-fourths of districts with advanced programs in K–8 reported screening all students using a standardized assessment, at least in one grade. Given the strong research backing for “universal screening,” that’s reassuring.
Yet other worthy identification policies are scarce—in particular, screening students for advanced programming based on their “local” peers’ academic performance. In fact, only one-fifth of respondents say that their districts compare students’ performance to peers within the same district or school for identification purposes (a.k.a. “local norms”)—rather than a state or national benchmark. Applying local norms—such as identifying students performing in the top 10 percent of their school, district, or state—helps to detect a wider swath of advanced and potentially advanced children, especially those in high-poverty schools, and deserves more consideration.
We also found some encouraging evidence in elementary schools of the popularity of part-time pull-out classes for high achievers, giving those students an opportunity to engage with peers of similar abilities on advanced curriculum (45 percent of districts offer this). On the other hand, districts rarely accelerate young students by grade level or content area (no more than 4 percent of them), which enables children to “skip a grade”—either in all subject areas or one, say, math. This despite voluminous research evidence supporting the practice.
As for admission into advanced services, over half of districts do not allow early entry into kindergarten based on children’s readiness. But nearly the same percentage allow those who participate in advanced education in elementary school to be automatically enrolled in advanced courses in middle school and beyond.
So it’s quite a mixed bag, containing ample room for improvement. We see two overarching takeaways.
First, the identification side of advanced education is in better shape than the programmatic side. As indicated, a majority of districts use various assessments to screen elementary and middle school students for advanced programming, including performance on cognitive tests, diagnostic assessments, and state-mandated or other end-of-grade tests. Over three-quarters of districts (77 percent) use a standardized test to screen all students in one or more grades.
But there is so much more that districts should and could be doing for advanced learners once they are identified, especially in the early grades. Nearly half report that one of the most common types of advanced programming in elementary and middle schools is “in-class differentiation in general classrooms with no clustering of gifted students.” It’s not hard to see the drawbacks to that approach—as Loveless pointed out so many years ago. Likewise, 44 percent report using the same curriculum for advanced students as for other students, albeit with some modification. Barely 11 percent of districts report offering distance or online learning opportunities for advanced learners in the elementary and middle grades. Come on—clearly, we can do better!
Second, the difficulties associated with providing advanced education are most keenly felt in the elementary grades (after students are identified) and in the middle grades, when advanced courses are often limited to math. Once students get to high school, they typically have more opportunities to be challenged. In fact, 58 to 80 percent of districts offer high school honors classes in one or more core subjects, and two-thirds of districts—according to federal data—offer AP Math or AP Science classes (though with clear variation among schools within districts). About half of districts also expand access to advanced courses by allowing high school students to take AP or IB courses online.
To our eyes, then, there’s a sizable leak in the pipeline after early elementary school, when students are identified for advanced services, and before the high school grades, when they gain more exposure to advanced courses, both in person and online. But not nearly enough is happening in between. Hence the title of this report, The Broken Pipeline.
Still, leaks or not, we aren’t glass-half-empty types. Our glass-half-full view is that broken pipes can be fixed. So let’s get out those toolboxes!
