The US is Neglecting its Smartest Kids (NPR Article)

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So it's not surprising that his grandkids got him wondering about — and researching — a big question: How well is the U.S. educating its top performers?

His answer: not very. "High achievers are being neglected in all sort of ways by schools that had no incentive to push them farther up."

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1. Just 8.8 percent of U.S. students are classified as "high achievers" in mathematics, according to the most recent international assessments. That's well below the average of 12.6 percent for affluent nations.

2. No Child Left Behind, the 2001 federal law, incentivizes "just getting kids over a bar," Finn says. "In the public policies affecting our schools — state and federal — there's almost no incentive to boost a smart kid up the scale or take someone who's 'proficient' and push them to 'advanced.' " [We've written before about proficiency and the tendency, under high-stakes testing, for schools to focus resources on kids who are "on the bubble."]

3. It's not just the federal government. Finn says efforts to improve schools in the states, as well as most philanthropic efforts, "have concentrated almost exclusively on low achievers and bringing them up and closing gaps from the bottom up."

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This has always been the case in my experience. The best and brightest are assumed to be able to fend for themselves. School systems (at least the public ones) are paranoid about segregating kids by ability levels...

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This has been my greatest criticism of the public school system. One has only to compare the amount of funding we spend on "special" needs students to see the gross inequality. We invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in the education of children who are less likely to find gainful employment than a golden retriever- while we don't even have a classification to identify the gifted children! The gifted child would excel with even a modest amount of extra attention and the flexibility to learn at their own more rapid pace instead of being shackled to the slowest common denominator. The gifted student is ignored- because they're not a problem child. If we spent as much money developing the gifted as we do supporting the "special"- our gifted students would have gone on to find a cure for the "special" already! When will our culture pity wasted potential as much as we pity those who are "special" and throw money at them?

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