How The U.S. Is Neglecting Its Smartest Kids
Chester E. Finn, Jr. has three very bright granddaughters. He thinks they "have considerable academic potential and are not always being challenged by their schools." But Finn is not just a proud grandpa; he's a long-established expert on education policy with the Fordham Institute and Hoover Institution.
So its not surprising that his grandkids got him wondering about — and researching — a big question: How well is the U.S. doing 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."
His research became a book, with co-author Brandon Wright, out next month from Harvard University Press. It's titled Failing Our Brightest Kids: The Global Challenge of Educating High-Ability Students. It contains an analysis of the U.S. issue, plus case studies on gifted education from a dozen countries around the world.
Failing Our Brightest Kids
The Global Challenge of Educating High-ability Students
Paperback, 304 pagespurchase
More on this book:
I talked with Finn about the problems he sees in how high-ability students are taught in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Here are 10 eye-opening points drawn from our conversation.
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."
4. Finn and Wright analyzed results from the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, to show that the United States is exceptionally bad at producing low-income high achievers. For example, only 2.45 percent of low-income students in U.S. score top marks in mathematics.
5. This has nothing to do with innate ability, Finn and Wright argue, because other countries manage to do much better. Among the poorest students in Shanghai, 35 percent get top marks on the same math test.
6. High-ability poor kids are more likely to be attending schools with limited resources, where the teachers' attention is taken up with struggling students. That's How The U.S. Is Neglecting Its Smartest Kids : NPR Ed : NPR: