Achievement gaps are large and growing across the country, writes Chad Aldeman on The 74. It's not the pandemic: Scores have been falling for a decade. It's not Common Core or the recession or even smart phones, he argues.
It's accountability, he concludes. Under No Child Left Behind, schools were held accountable for enabling students to make "adequate yearly progress." Scores rose for low and high achievers. In 2012, President Obama announced accountability waivers in exchange for other reforms. Scores began to fall, especially for low achievers.
"Instead of interventions for all children in low-performing schools, states could choose how many schools to identify for improvement and what happened there," writes Aldeman, who was working for the U.S. Education Department at the time. Then, in 2015, the unpopular No Child Left Behind was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act.
Aldeman focuses on eighth-grade math skills, which are linked to future success, but notes that "similar achievement trends are evident in other grades and subjects, including reading, history and civics.
From 2003 to 2013, "the lowest and highest performers both improved about 8 points — close to a year’s worth of progress — on NAEP, the Nation’s Report Card," he writes. "From 2013 to 2019, scores for the lowest-performing 10% of students fell 7 points, versus a gain of 3 points for students at the higher end."
The response to Covid widened the gap even further.
Read the whole article (and check out the lovely, interactive graphs) for Aldeman's case against other theories for the decline. He concludes that "holding school systems accountable for their lowest-performing students was working — until policymakers decided the pressure wasn’t worth it."
Low-performing schools are under no federal pressure to improve, writes Alyson Klein in Education Week. And they're not.
Every Student Succeeds left up to states and districts to decide how to fix their worst-performing schools, Klein writes. Many "have been left to languish in the academic doldrums, without clear improvement strategies to use or dedicated resources to execute turnarounds, according to a Government Accountability Office report.