In order to bring about greater postsecondary opportunities and success for students from families of lesser economic means, more time and money should be directed toward high-achieving students who attend high-poverty schools.
That is one of the key points made in a new report titled “A Level Playing Field: How College Readiness Standards Change the Accountability Game.”
“These high-performing kids, particularly in high-poverty settings, are a really important group for us to take care of,” said John Cronin, director of the Kingsbury Center at the Northwest Evaluation Association, or NWEA, the organization that produced the report. “And schools should start thinking about this group as a group they need to attend to.”
Cronin said current legislation, particularly No Child Left Behind—the George W. Bush administration’s signature education initiative that called for all students to be proficient in reading in math by 2014 and which many states have obtained waivers for under the current administration—“doesn’t incentivize schools to focus energy and resources on this group.”
The new NWEA report calls for rethinking the way schools are held accountable for student achievement by focusing more on growth as opposed to the conventional benchmarks of proficiency and college and career readiness.
When proficiency is the focus, Cronin lamented, most of the attention and resources go to “bubble students,” or those who are on the verge of proficiency, at the expense of those who are significantly below or above proficiency.
The report also calls for making high-achieving students a subgroup for accountability purposes.
