Achievement gaps are growing
- Joanne Jacobs
- Mar 20
- 2 min read
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.
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.
59,124 runners finished the 2025 New York City Marathon. The fastest ran a 4:54 pace; the slowest completed the course at a 29:12 pace. In actuality, the runners were started in waves, so the fastest and the slowest didn't start at the same time, but for this thought experiment, pretend they did. Also pretend that they run at a constant speed, which isn't realistic, but still...
At minute 0:00, the runners are together at the same mile marker, so they are 0.00 miles apart.
At minute 29:12, the slowest has completed 1.00 mile while the fastest has completed 5.96 miles, so they are 4.96 miles apart.
At minute 58:24, the slowest has completed 2.00 miles while the fastest has completed…
"Social justice is an actual impediment to acquiring human capital"
--Thomas Sowell
I would be interested in seeing to what extent the lowest-achieving students had measurable gaps in attendance. Even if schools come up with worthwhile programs that would address the neediest kids, it won't matter if the students aren't regularly showing up.
The other really big problem is 'philosophical': the progressive ed folks tend to believe that noticing the gaps is problematic, even racist. (So there's pressure to obscure and talk away the existence or importance of these gaps.) "You're looking at children from a deficit model," they'll say: i.e., you're noticing that there are children who are not succeeding, which is our shameful secret that shouldn't be mentioned. You're not talking about all the wonderful characteristics and capabilities that …