Achievement gaps are growing

The "academic gap between the highest- and lowest-achieving students has grown signficantly since 2005" in the vast majority of schools, writes Kevin Mahnken on The 74. Covid-era disruptions made large gaps even wider.

Achievement is rising for all students at Department of Defense schools.

It's "demoralizing," said Patrick Wolf, a University of Arkansas economist who co-authored a paper with Annenberg Institute researchers. “We expect and hope our public schools will be great equalizers and will reduce gaps between the top performers and the low performers, or the rich and the poor,” he said. But that's not happening.

Researchers analyzed the “90/10 gap” — the difference in NAEP scores between students who score at the 90th percentile and those at the 10th percentile, Mahnken explains. They controlled "for factors like students’ race or socioeconomic status, as well as the educational background of their parents."

Academic gaps grew fastest in traditional public schools. For example, 90th percentile fourth-graders improved in reading and math between 2005 and 2024, while 10th-percentile scores dropped. "The already-substantial gap between the most advanced and most challenged fourth graders expanded by 1.3 years’ worth of learning gains between the Bush administration and the Biden administration," writes Mahnken. "For eighth graders, the gap grew by one-half year of learning in both subjects over the same time period."

Catholic schools saw a similar pattern, though not quite as bad.

Both charters and Department of Defense (DoD) schools "saw a much slower drift between high- and low-achieving students, much of which appears to have been triggered directly by the pandemic," writes Mahnken.

In charter schools, low achievers were improving before the pandemic. The Department of Defense (DoD) schools saw significant achievement gains for both 10th percentile and 90th percentile students.

Low-achieving students made significant progress in the early years of the education reform era, which started with the 2002 passage of the No Child Left Behind law, Wolf said. But those gains have been reversed since 2013.