"Narrowing the Gap"

[songsparrow]

I've heard of other schools mentioning this, and tonight I heard it at my daughter's school: their new goal is to work on narrowing the gap between the highest and lowest test scores. It's not phrased as working to raise the bottom scores. It's not phrased as working to raise the scores overall. But to narrow the gap between the top and bottom scores.

 

Can anyone explain to me what is meant by this? Is it just an odd phrasing that means trying to raise the low scores (and that the high scores are good enough so we're not focusing on them at all)? Because I really can't think that they truly mean that they want to move everyone closer to the median by raising the low scores and lowering the high scores.

[Arcadia]

Because I really can't think that they truly mean that they want to move everyone closer to the median by raising the low scores and lowering the high scores.

 

Sometimes this can happen. The teachers are told to concentrate those failing or near failing and the rest of the class relies on parents afterschooling.

 

"Narrowing the gap" has been touted since the 70s back home for narrowing the performance/achievement gap between races. When schools are well funded, there are remedial teachers to help with the weaker students in each subject to "close" the gap. When schools are adequately funded with no extra funds, the teachers have to teach to the test for the weaker students while the stronger ones fend for themselves.

 

ETA:

An interesting paper on "Narrowing the gap giving every child a chance to succeed" by oxford university press

[Caroline]

It's a phrase from NCLB. It means to raise the test scores of different groups. While the school's average may look ok, often if you separate out different subgroups of kids--by race, socio-economic status, students with disabilities, English language learners, males, females--and look at the group's average it is far below that of the school. So the idea is to raise the scores of each subgroup so you aren't leaving all of your kids living in poverty behind.

[Heather in Neverland]

Most if not all funding for gifted programs in public schools has been cut and billions is poured into special needs programs, etc.. So the general mentality is that the "upper level" kids are already smart and will be fine so we don't need to do too much for them. We need just need to bring the other kids up. I think this philosophy is very short-sighted.

[jennynd]

Is that the reason why my 4 yrs old is doing my 3rd grader school work?

[butterflymommy]

It could mean that they will narrow the gap by having different passing scores by race... this is already part of many school districts' policy and there have been some articles written about it (at least one was discussed here). So "narrow the gap" is a vague enough way of saying it because "raising test scores to the same level" isn't necessarily the goal.

[Lucy the Valiant]

I may be understanding this incorrectly, but I think the stated purpose of No Child Left Behind is to cut "the gap" (between current passing scores and 100%) in half each year. So a school / class / population group currently scoring in the 60% is supposed to score 80% the next year, 90% the year after that, 95% the year after that, etc. or risk being labeled a "failing school."

 

(This rationale was the justification for the racially-explained goals coming out of Florida recently; i.e., it's not "racist" because the standards are applied universally to all racial and socio-economic sub-categories.)

[Ali in OR]

Ah, my pet peeve. I'm not a fan of "narrowing the gap", but it's an official goal of public schools in Oregon. The idea is just to decrease the spread between the top performers and the bottom performers and it is a metric that schools measure. Resources, funds, and great attention are paid to the lowest quartile performers. I went to a school board meeting where a middle school principal did a power point presentation that showcased the improvements shown by the lowest two quartiles on yearly tests. Almost as an aside, he mentioned that testing that compared a student's scores to their own scores in previous years showed that the top two quartiles showed no growth while they were in middle school. No one should really think that is acceptable, but if your metric is only that the gap between top and bottom is smaller, you're doing great. Thus there are no honors level courses in the middle school or anything to push and challenge the top half of the students.

[Reya]

It means they will ignore the higher achieving kids and put all resources into the lower achieving kids.

[snowbeltmom]

... The idea is just to decrease the spread between the top performers and the bottom performers and it is a metric that schools measure. Resources, funds, and great attention are paid to the lowest quartile performers...

 

This. No Child Left Behind a.k.a No Child Able to Move Forward.

[OH_Homeschooler]

An unintended (I hope) consequence of NCLB was that (some) schools felt they had had to focus on those students below the proficiency level. Even more specifically, they focused on those who were just below the the proficiency level because they were the easiest to bump into the next scoring category. If you were solidly proficient or solidly non-proficient, forget about it.

 

The focus now is turning to growth models, so all students will be encouraged to learn based on wherever they are starting out.