We all have our pet causes and issues in education that get us carbonated. At the top of my list is the fate of potentially high-achieving kids, low-income kids who are left to languish in lowest common denominator schools. Thus I’m happy to see the estimable Jay Mathews devote his Wash Post column to the recent Fordham report, High-Achieving Students in the Era of No Child Left Behind. I’ll think twice, however, about casually tossing around the phrase “achievement gap” in the future, thanks to Uncle Jay.
Why don’t I like talking about the achievement gap? Because we use the term in a way that suggests narrowing the gap is always a good thing, when that is not so. Here are some ways the gap could narrow: Low-income scores improve but high-incomes scores don’t; low-income scores don’t change but high-income scores drop; low-income scores drop but high-income scores drop even more. In each of those cases of gap-narrowing, something bad is happening.
Mathews posits that concerns about the income gap have crept into the way we talk about academic achievement. “I can understand distaste for people who build 50-room mansions with gold bathroom fixtures. But can anyone learn too much?” he asks. “Wisdom tends to help everyone who comes in contact with it. Ski chalets in Aspen are less useful to those of us who can’t afford them.”
Labels, of course, tend to stick once they’ve taken root, and it’s unlikely “achievement gap” will disappear. Low-income underachievement, perhaps?
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Good article by Mathews. I have also wondered just what is meant by the achievement gap, and if it’s necessarily all bad. I too have been very much aware that the easiest way to close the gap, whatever gap we’re talking about, is to enforce mediocrity on high achievers. That is definitely not a good thing to do.
But I do disagree with Matthews on one point. He says closing the gap by bringing up the bottom while not bringing up the top is a bad thing, because both bottom and top should be brought up. I’m not so sure about that. I think one way to define the achievement gap is as the gap between potential and actualization of that potential. Suppose the low achievers are achieving only 40% of their potential and the high achievers are achieving 80% of their potential. Wouldn’t it be a lot harder to raise that 80% than to raise the 40%? Or change the figures to 50% and 95%, and the case is even stronger. My thought is that people who are achieving 95% of their potential should be congratulated and left alone.
Of course all this is subjective. I wouldn’t know how in the world you would objectively measure a person’s achievement as a percentage of their potential. And certainly achieving 95% of your potential is not the way to get into the Olympic games. But why should we ask everyone to act like Olympic competitors?
As teachers we subjectively compare potential to achievement every day. When I think of the students in my college algebra classes, I see quite a few not applying themselves, and I wish they would. But I also see a fair number working very hard. They are their own stern taskmasters. I don’t know whether they are achieving at 80% of their potential, or 90%, or 98%, but it surely doesn’t seem realistic to ask them to improve as much as all those slackers in my class. I’ll congratulate them on making their A, or B, or even a C, and leave it at that.
I thank Mr. Matthews for daring to be politically incorrect and question the goal of closing an achievement gap when perhaps the goal should actually be to provide each child an education best suited to his/her learning profile. I believe the poster above
could find value added assessment methodology interesting so he can understand that no matter where one’s starting point in learning may lie, it is possible for the growth of the top 10% to be considered as important as the growth of the bottom 10%. May I suggest that he pushes all his students to excel? His choice to leave the better students at just that is a smack in the face to excellence in education. The neglect of excellence in education can and will be seen in our inability to compete with international competitors in a global economy.