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Above the Curve, Below the Radar

Low-income high-achievers are losing ground in the country’s fight for proficiency. Why it’s happening and what can be done.

By Michelle R. Davis Photographs
Photographs by Jean-Christian Bourcart

When it's lab day in Dan Waldman's (G.N.O. '05) 11th grade Advanced Placement physics class, the students get revved up to use digital meters to measure the velocity and acceleration of small carts using a ramp and pulley system. But the New Orleans charter-school students are still getting used to having several hours of homework a night and attending school on Saturdays. Waldman's physics class is O. Perry Walker High School's first AP class, and even the 33 students enrolled are just beginning to grasp what that means.

"With a lot of their classes, they were used to completion of assignments without real understanding, but in an AP class, that just doesn't cut it," says Waldman, who led the charge last year to bring AP to his school. "I can't let them just complete the work and say they're doing well in the class."

Close to a third of American high schools don't offer any AP classes at all. Many schools simply don't have enough high-performing students or qualified teachers to sustain AP programming. It's just one more indicator that in many under-resourced schools across the country, students who meet or exceed the bar of proficiency tend to fly under the radar, allowed to coast unchallenged through their academic careers.

At O. Perry Walker, one of the first schools in New Orleans to reopen after Hurricane Katrina, there has been a slow shift, one that some experts say is not happening in enough schools across the country. After years of marshaling most of its resources toward bringing lowerachieving students to proficiency, the high-needs school is starting to think harder about how it can do a better job of challenging its mid-level and advanced students.

"It took a few years for me to realize there were a couple of levels of the achievement gap, because the nonreaders and the kids that are struggling just cry out for help," says Mark Bailey (G.N.O. '01), an assistant principal at O. Perry Walker. "The kids in our school that were already considered capable and diligent students, people just didn't worry about them."

Stalled Progress for Top Students
There are signs that the advancement of these students is faltering. Recent studies, including one by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, have found that while lower-achieving students are making great strides—which remains an important goal—scores of higherachieving students have stalled or even lost ground.

Already strained by limited resources, the situation may be exacerbated by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which mandates penalties for schools that fail to bring lagging students up to speed but contains no incentives to increase achievement levels for more accomplished students.

But the issue is complex, involving everything from school resources to teacher quality to social and political forces that sometimes pit lower-achieving students against top performers, says Ross Wiener, vice president for program and policy at the Education Trust, a nonprofit advocacy organization.

"There's little recognition of the need to get students to advanced levels of achievement. There are some real trade-offs that need to be balanced, in terms of making sure every student gets a foundational set of skills but also making sure we're growing every student to their potential," he says. "It's not easy to figure out how to focus on all those things at the same time."

Statistician William L. Sanders, a senior research fellow at the University of North Carolina and senior manager of value-added assessment and research for the SAS Institute Inc., has studied high-achieving low-income students for more than a quarter century. During that time, he has tracked tens of thousands of students, some from middle school through college.

Sanders says most high-needs schools tend to spend their energy and resources on the students they have most of—usually struggling students. The result is that many low-income students who rank as high achievers in elementary school slip down by the time they reach middle school. "If you follow them, those early high-achieving kids are making less progress," he says. "It's like a big magnet pulling their achievement levels closer to those of the lower-achieving kids."

Joshua S. Wyner reports similar findings in "Achievement Trap: How America Is Failing Millions of High- Achieving Students from Lower-Income Families," a study released in 2008 by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. Wyner and his coauthors found that not only do low-income students start out in the top quarter of the class in smaller numbers—28 percent versus 72 percent from higher-income families— but they also don't maintain that status at the same rate as their higherincome counterparts.

Raising the Bar for Teachers and Kids
What's to blame? Teacher quality is a big factor, Sanders says. Low-income students tend to have less-qualified teachers, who often don't have subjectspecific backgrounds—particularly critical in science and math.

Lax expectations for low-income students may also play a role. The high-achieving students at high-needs schools often can't measure up to the same segment of students in affluent schools.

"The big lie is that an A really doesn't mean an A. It doesn't mean you're doing A-level work," Wyner says. "These kids are being told they're at the top of the heap, when in fact they're not learning what's necessary to remain at the top."

Monica Piquet-Rodriguez (Houston '01) has seen this false standard shake the confidence of some of her most capable students. Piquet- Rodriguez directs Fantastic Learning Opportunities, a program at Lee High School in the Houston Independent School District that places low-income students into top after-school and summer programs across the country and internationally. Her students have studied Shakespeare in Italy, camped in Yosemite National Park, and watched government in action in Washington, D.C., but she acknowledges that the brightest students at her school struggle alongside the top students from more affluent Houston schools.

Two of her students enrolled in a leadership program that grouped them with outstanding students from around the state. When Piquet-Rodriguez picked them up from one of their first events, she expected the students to be bubbling with enthusiasm. Instead, they seemed cowed. "They both said to me: 'The rest of the students in the program are really smart. The words they use… They speak so clearly and confidently,' " she says. "They really noticed the gap."

Piquet-Rodriguez adds that with continued support, the intimidation factor was temporary. "Now they know they can roll with those students, but it just takes them a bit more work," she says.

"Unintentionally, the fate of these kids has become incidental to our education mission rather than fundamental," says David Coleman, founder of Student Achievement Partners, a group working to improve student outcomes. "Excellent education means an excellent education from where these students begin. For kids that are already strong, that means catapulting them to a new level."

An Either/Or Proposition?
In public education, a realm of limited resources—in dollars and human capital— the question that naturally arises is: Can we do both? Can we prioritize the progress of our already high-achieving kids without detracting from the worthy efforts to bring lagging students up to speed?

There's a fair amount of disagreement on the answer. Education policy experts Frederick M. Hess and Andrew J. Rotherham wrote in a 2008 article in Phi Delta Kappan that a trade-off is inevitable: "Historically, there always has been an unavoidable tension between efforts to bolster American 'competitiveness' (read: efforts to boost the performance of elite students, especially in science, math, and engineering) and those to promote educational equity. Champions of particular federal initiatives tend to argue that the two notions are complementary, but history shows that the ascendance of one tends to distract from attention paid to the other."

However, Michael J. Petrilli, the Fordham Institute's vice president for national programs and policy, insists, "It's not a Robin Hood effect," where one group takes resources from another, but rather an issue of accountability. He cites standards-based reform and the current policy environment, including NCLB, as culprits. Most states aren't judged on the overall growth of all students, he says, but on whether students meet a fairly low bar of accomplishment. "The current policy environment creates incentives for schools to focus on the 'bubble kids' or the kids closest to reaching proficiency," he says. "Policymakers could adjust that environment through growth models and other means to create incentives for schools to pay attention to all kids, including those at the top."

Jane Clarenbach, the director of public education for the National Association for Gifted Children, says the focus on basic proficiency means many state assessments aren't designed to provide a clear picture of where more advanced students are in their education. "If the assessment isn't powerful enough, if it's too blunt, it can't show growth or even measure where the kid in the 95th percentile is going," she says.

The first step, Coleman suggests, is applying the same rigor of accountability to the progress of high achievers as to the progress of those who are struggling. Most schools throughout the nation are measuring and sifting data on low-performing students to ensure that they're getting closer to academic proficiency and hitting annual goals or making "adequate yearly progress" as required by NCLB. But few schools are looking at data from high-achieving students the same way. "Without a strong and expli

cit focus on this challenge, change will not occur," Coleman says. "When have you heard of a gifted program being shut down [because students weren't making enough progress]?"

In addition, schools trying to cater to high-achieving students often provide enrichment activities that can be costly, and in Coleman's view, don't always push these students to higher levels. Having a high-achieving student read an advanced book can be a "wonderful, difficult challenge," he says, and may do more for a student's academic progress than visiting a museum or watching a science show.

"What they need is to be rigorously challenged," he says. "The pressure needs to be intensified, and they need to be put in an environment where the teacher is no longer satisfied with coasting."

Furthermore, Coleman believes the friction over limited resources is needless. "The more we learn about how to push kids extremely far," he says, "the more we learn to push all kids."

Targeting the Top
Educators in Chicago Public Schools are trying a more focused means to increasing academic rigor for high achievers. In addition to a wide-ranging program for gifted students, the district has created honors programs within some schools. Megan Beaudoin (Chicago '01) is the coordinator of the Law Academy at Hirsch Metro High School, a four-year honors program designed to introduce students to careers in law and law enforcement.

Beaudoin oversees the program, which serves about 30 students in each grade of high school. While Chicago Public Schools has an overall graduation rate of only 55 percent, 85 percent of Beaudoin's students graduate and go on to college.

Beaudoin says the issue of tracking— grouping students by academic performance level—does concern her, and that the academy works to make sure kids don't get pigeonholed. "We try to allow for a little bit of flexibility," she says. After the first year, a student who is struggling may leave the program and another who is on the cusp can join. Students who need extra help in certain subjects have the option of enrolling in alternative courses.

Still, Beaudoin believes the benefits of the program outweigh the risks. In addition to the law classes, the students take honors-level classes in the rest of their subjects. "I see a real struggle for the kids who are achieving at higher levels to be challenged," Beaudoin says. Outside of the Law Academy, "there isn't much attention paid at our school to the students at the top of the class, so they'll leave or transfer. Others will start off well for the first couple of years and be this wonderful source of potential, but then you see them meld back in with the general population because they're not being challenged."

As part of the Law Academy program, students analyze legal cases and write and edit opening and closing arguments for mock trials. Beaudoin describes how one student, now a senior, came into the program as a sophomore reluctant to speak in class. Originally from Jamaica, the girl was self-conscious about her accent and could have languished in standard classes. "Through the law program, she was introduced to these higher-level concepts and got to argue cases before real judges," Beaudoin says. "She blew the competition out of the water."

One Class, Many Levels
Some schools take another tack, choosing to keep students of all academic levels together but differentiating instruction within each classroom. KIPP WAYS Academy in Atlanta uses differentiation and designates one block a day toward providing lagging students with extra help. Those above grade level may instead take a novels class during that time to challenge them. In other classes, high-achieving students present the lessons to their classmates.

"In order to have engaging conversations, everyone needs to be present," says KIPP WAYS principal Kimberly Karacalidis (Atlanta '00). "We use our students to push each other. High students are not high in everything, and low students are not always low. You need everyone at the table to move from good to great. What is higher-performing? If it's good thinking, then that can come from anyone."

Karacalidis previously spent three years teaching fifth grade math at the school, and says that each day she prepared three separate lesson plans to target the low-, mid-, and high-level learners in her classes. She also presented students with tiered homework and generally allowed them to choose their assignment level. The students usually sought out the harder work, she says.

Though differentiation can be widely implemented at relatively low cost, Karacalidis admits that "it's a lot of work on the front end for the teacher, and it's hard getting all the resources you need to be effective." For it to be a viable solution, she says, requires "a lot of training and desire on the part of the teacher."

"How we recruit, prepare and support, evaluate, and compensate teachers can make a huge difference," adds the Education Trust's Wiener. "There's tremendous room for innovation and improvement."

Islands of Excellence
Research shows that teachers want to reach all of their students. In a survey conducted as part of a Fordham Institute report, 86 percent of teachers questioned said it was important to focus equally on all students, regardless of their background or achievement level. Only 11 percent said it was more important to focus on raising the achievement of disadvantaged students or those struggling academically.

But most teachers also said the academically advanced students at their schools were a moderate or low priority. An overwhelming majority said it was struggling students—not advanced students—who got the most attention. In many schools with few resources, it often falls to a handful of talented and creative teachers to inspire high-achieving students and push them ahead.

At Edcouch-Elsa High School in Edcouch, Texas, physical science teacher Jeremy Wickenheiser (R.G.V. '05) created a scientific research and design class akin to engineering for high-achieving students in the lowincome school. Over the last two years, students in his advanced class have built a full-sized, solar-powered car and raced it in competition.

Maria Garcia, now a freshman at the Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas in Mexico, says Wickenheiser's class had a profound impact on her. "It not only changed my academic view of school and provided me with skills that only experiences like that can give you, but it also changes your view of life and yourself," she wrote in an e-mail. "I feel that I am a more prepared individual, that I can accomplish anything that I set myself to do. The class... gave me the opportunity to analyze myself, to discover my talents, and to realize that I have the potential to do many things."

Because of the hands-on nature of the class, only about 10 students can participate. Wickenheiser acknowledges that his school just doesn't have the resources to establish classes like his to challenge and inspire higher-level students. "We're a smaller school, so it's difficult to offer a broad range of things that would excite students to begin with," says Wickenheiser, who sought out grants and donations from local businesses to fund his program.

Supports outside the classroom may help too. Project ALERTA is a yearlong academic enrichment program aimed at increasing the number of Latino students who enter collegepreparatory middle or high school programs in Boston. This includes Boston Public Schools' three highestachieving magnet schools. Latinos have had a low presence in these so-called exam schools—8 percent in the most competitive of the three schools, versus 35 percent in the district overall.

Project ALERTA doesn't provide remedial tutoring, but rather supplies thematic academic enrichment to fill in the gaps a student's public school instruction might leave, says director Katie Graham (Baltimore '99). Instructors, all current or former teachers, choose a theme and provide science, social studies, math, and literature lessons tied to grade-level standards. Last summer, for example, the theme was ecology and the environment.

Students visited Spectacle Island in Boston Harbor, which was created from the landfill generated by the city's Big Dig construction. Students completed a recycling project and used the data gleaned from it for a math unit.

"One of the goals is to keep it at a level of rigor so that it becomes an additional challenge for kids who are mid-achieving students," Graham says. "I want the program to be that bump to help them become highachieving students."

Teacher Jenn De Leon (Bay Area '02) works with 10 Project ALERTA students during the school year. She says the program's theme-based approach helps kids push the boundaries of their learning. Students in a high-achieving college-prep program are typically exposed to these instructional styles, but often students in high-needs schools are not. The Project ALERTA students "use their higher-order thinking skills versus basic comprehension," De Leon says. "Worksheets in schools can be rigorous, but it doesn't always provide the opportunity to expand and dig deeper and make connections across curriculum and learning modalities."

Last year 14 percent of Project ALERTA's students who were tested for the exam schools gained entrance. Graham says that among students who had participated in the program for two or more years, 25 percent gained entrance.

To tackle the challenge of ensuring that mid-level and advanced students reach their potential, it's going to take concerted and new efforts by everyone from classroom teachers to policymakers, says Coleman. "Let's try to take all the excuses off the table," he says. "Until it's measured and cared about…we're not going to create that climate of performance."

Back at O. Perry Walker, physics teacher Waldman says it's exhilarating to see that his students can compete when it comes to higher-level thinking in science, but he also finds that their literacy skills and study habits are holding them back. Though the school currently has only the one physics Advanced Placement class, next year it's adding several more AP classes in different subjects. That's good, Waldman says, because as he walks the halls he sees many kids who might be inspired and pushed to achieve more in such classes—with the right support.

"There is a potential for all of these kids to succeed," he says. "Our net just isn't cast wide enough."