No Use For Achievement Gap

Today I read an interesting article in the Washington Post entitled “Why I Have No Use for the Achievement Gap”. While being very opinionated, as implied by the title, it was also very thought provoking. The article was a little bit of a criticism of No Child Left Behind, it pointed out the fact that while No Child Left Behind was helping the bottom end of America’s children it was also not focusing equal attention of our high achieving students. The trends of our high achieving students used to trend upward, constantly producing more intelligent and well prepared students. Now those same students at the top are now steadying off, not getting worse but not flourishing.

Another interesting point made is that people always view narrowing the achievement gap as positive. There are a plethora of situations where that is not always the case, as he points out, "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," It is not always fair to jude our educational improvement on the narrowing of the education gap. No Child Left Behind may not be the best course of action for our education system, or if it is, focus needs to be spread more evenly over all students.