The Bright Students Left Behind
While everyone focuses on boosting the weakest students, America’s smartest children are no longer being pushed to do their best
A great problem in U.S. education is that gifted students are rarely pushed to achieve their full potential. It is no secret that American students overall lag their international peers. Among the 34 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, whose students took the PISA exams in 2012, the U.S. ranked 17th in reading, 20th in science and 27th in math.
Less well known is how few young Americans—particularly the poor and minorities—reach the top ranks on such measures. The PISA test breaks students into six levels of math literacy, and only 9% of American 15-year-olds reached the top two tiers. Compare that with 16% in Canada, 17% in Germany and 40% in Singapore.
Among the handful of American high achievers, only one in eight comes from the bottom socioeconomic quartile. In Canada it’s one in four; Germany one in six; and Singapore one in three.
What has gone wrong? Thanks to No Child Left Behind and its antecedents, U.S. education policy for decades has focused on boosting weak students to minimum proficiency while neglecting the children who have already cleared that low bar. When parents of “gifted” youngsters complained, they were accused of elitism. It is rich that today’s policies purport to advance equality, yet harm the smartest kids from disadvantaged circumstances.
High achievers were taken more seriously during the Sputnik era. The National Association for Gifted Children was founded in 1954, the same year as the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. As the country concerned itself with educational equity, John W. Gardner, the president of the Carnegie Corporation (and future U.S. secretary of health, education and welfare), posed a provocative question in a seminal 1961 book with the title, “Excellence: Can we be equal and excellent too?”
The year 1983 brought “A Nation at Risk,” the celebrated report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, which declared that poor schools were contributing to national weakness: “Our once unchallenged pre-eminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world.” Five years later Congress passed the sole federal program to focus specifically on gifted students, which intermittently provides a modest $9 million a year for them.
Poor test scores show that gifted American children still aren’t reaching the heights they are capable of. How do other nations achieve better results? We set out to examine 11 of them—four in Asia, four in Europe, and three that speak English—for our forthcoming book, “Failing Our Brightest Kids: The Global Challenge of Educating High-Ability Students.”
Unsurprisingly we found that culture, values and attitudes matter a great deal. Parents in Korea, Japan and Taiwan push their kids to excel, and often pay for outside tutors and The Bright Students Left Behind - WSJ: