High-achieving students aren’t being held back by the focus on leaving no child behind, concludes a Fordham report. But the best students aren’t improving as quickly as kids at the bottom.

>In 4th grade, for instance, the children in the bottom tier raised their test scores by 16 percentage points, while higher-achieving students gained three points, according to the report’s analysis of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

“There’s no Robin Hood effect here,” said the report’s author, education analyst Tom Loveless, who noted that the scores of top students did not decline. Rather, he said, top students are “just puttering along” as students in the lowest tier made large gains.

Teachers have “limited time and resources,” write Fordham’s Finn and Petrilli in No Child Gets Ahead. (See Flypaper for more Fordham comment.)

81 percent of teachers say that “academically struggling” students are likely to get their one-on-one attention today, versus just 5 percent who say that about “advanced students.”

Is this a problem?

Everyone wants equity and excellence, but schools can’t do it all, writes Eduwonk.

It doesn’t mean that we throw different groups of student under the bus, but any accountability system that holds people accountable for everything holds them accountable for nothing. So choices have to be made about emphasis. And considering the yawning achievement gaps, graduation rate gaps, and outcome gaps that separate poor and minority students from other students, that’s where I’d argue the emphasis should be placed.

I agree.

Yes we can have more equity and more excellence, writes Greg Forster.

At struggling schools, students are neglected if they’re doing better than their low-achieving classmates, writes Robert Pondiscio, who taught fifth grade in the South Bronx. He suggests tracking and a rigorous curriculum.

The children of low-income, poorly educated and Latino mothers benefit the most from preschool. But they’re the least likely to be enrolled in a high-quality preschool, a RAND study found.

Among children who could benefit the most from quality preschool, no more than 15 percent are enrolled in classrooms that meet quality benchmarks for instructional supports that promote higher-order thinking and language skills.

Children of educated, middle-class mothers are more likely to attend a quality preschool, the study found.

Two thirds of 4-year-olds in California attend a preschool or child care center.

On Early Stories, Liz Willen looks at a St. Louis summer kindergarten readiness program and New York City’s pre-k chaos.

In Canada, an autistic girl’s aide went to a psychic who said a girl with a name starting in “V” was being molested by a 23- to 26-year-old male. The aide told the principal who called in sexual abuse investigators, who found nothing.

Barrie resident Colleen Leduc has pulled her 11-year-old daughter, Victoria Nolet, out of school.

Severely autistic, Victoria doesn’t speak. She is never unsupervised and does not associate with adult men.

The school officials apparently linked the psychic’s warning with Victoria’s behavior.

Leduc added some of the behaviour her daughter displays is normal for young girls with autism, including putting her hands down her pants and gyrating against staff members.

“All of these are very, very … common in a child with autism, especially when they’re going into adolescence,” Leduc said. “She really has no inhibitions.”

Leduc said there are boys in Victoria’s class who exhibit similar behaviour, but when she asked if the CAS had been notified about those potential cases, she was told they had not.

Leduc would like an apology.

Giving poor kids computers doesn’t help them do better in school, writes Ray Fisman in Slate. Children are more likely to use computers for entertainment than for learning.

In Romania, some low-income families were given vouchers to help them buy computers; others applied but were turned down. Children spent seven hours more per week on the computer once they had one at home.

Much of this computer time came at the expense of television-watching: Children in families that received a voucher spent 3.5 fewer hours in front of the tube per week. But computer use also crowded out homework (2.3 hours less per week), reading, and sleep. Less schoolwork translated into lower grades at school — vouchered kids’ GPAs were 0.36 grade points lower than their nonvouchered counterparts — and also lower aspirations for higher education. Vouchered kids were 13 percentage points less likely to report an intention to attend college. And, interestingly, vouchered students who were college-bound were not more likely to express interest in majoring in computer science.

If a parent was at home to supervise, the negative effects were diminished significantly.

So, do we want to give a cheap laptop to every child?

District of Columbia students who receive federally funded scholarships to attend private schools are making gains in reading, reports a federal study of the program’s first 19 months. Some 88 percent of voucher recipients are two to four months ahead in reading, compared to public-school students who were turned down for a scholarship. However, that hasn’t translated into test scores: Voucher students earned similar test scores to the control group.

Is the glass half full? Half empty? Is there a glass? On Flypaper, Amber Winkler observes that rigorous studies tend to find very modest effects.

The scholarship program will expire next year, unless Congress authorizes more funds. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D.C.’s delegate to Congress, wants to defund the program, replacing it with charter schools, other public-school alternatives or with privately funded scholarships.

Don’t kill the program, editorializes the Washington Post, which points to very high parent satisfaction and the hope that reading gains will pay off over time.

Lost in the rhetoric about the politics of the program is the simple fact that, if not for these vouchers, 86 percent of these 1,900 children would be attending failing D.C. schools.

In an ABC News interview with Jake Tapper, Barack Obama is pro-charter and anti-voucher.

TAPPER: But one of the ways that proponents of school choice say that the best way to change the status quo is to give parents, inner-city parents a choice. Why not?

OBAMA: Well, the problem is, is that, you know, although it might benefit some kids at the top, what you’re going to do is leave a lot of kids at the bottom. We don’t have enough slots for every child to go into a parochial school or a private school. And what you would see is a huge drain of resources out of the public schools.

So what I’ve said is let’s foster competition within the public school system. Let’s make sure that charter schools are up and running. Let’s make sure that kids who are in failing schools, in local school districts, have an option to go to schools that are doing well.

But what I don’t want to do is to see a diminished commitment to the public schools to the point where all we have are the hardest-to-teach kids with the least involved parents with the most disabilities in the public schools. That’s going to make things worse, and we’re going to lose the commitment to public schools that I think have been so important to building this country.

Choice opponents always assume that the best parents will be the first to pull their kids out of public schools. So do choice proponents. See, we’ve all come together on something.

Obama’s children go to private school, writes William McGurn in the Wall St. Journal.

Update: A House committee has voted to give the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program one more year of funding.

My latest freelance project, The Education of Jaime Capellan: English Learner Success in California Schools, is up on the Lexington Institute site. (Yes, the name is a take-off on Leo Rosten’s Hyman Kaplan.) It’s a look at students who start school without proficient English skills but master English in elementary school and go on to outperform native English speakers.

I was surprised to learn that students from non-English-speaking homes who’ve achieved English proficiency are significantly more likely to take college-prep courses in high school than native speakers; they’re also more likely to pass the graduation exam on the first try. Of course, they’re a select group.

Unfortunately, about half of “English Learners” become “lifers.” They speak English but don’t read or write well enough to be considered proficient. And they do very poorly in school.