Achievement gaps may be shrinking overall, but new analyses of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data show that achievement gaps persist, and in some cases are widening, among the nation’s highest achieving students.
A recent report from the Center for Education and Evaluation Policy, Mind the (Other) Gap, examines achievement gaps among high-achieving students and found striking gaps in performance. The report’s authors looked at disaggregated NAEP data and examined the disparities between underrepresented students (e.g., low-income, minority, ELL) and non-underrepresented students in the advanced levels of performance on NAEP. A few findings from the report:
- only 1.7% of low-income students scored at the advanced level in 8th grade math in 2007, while the percentage of non-low-income students scoring in the advanced level in math was 10% – a gap of 8.3 percentage points
- the disparity between the percentage of low-income and non-low-income students scoring at the advanced level in 8th grade math, which the report’s authors label an ”excellence gap”, has widened since 1996, when the gap between the percentages of low-income and non-low-income students scoring in the advanced level of math was only 3.3 percentage points
- only .9% of African-American students scored at the advanced level in 8th grade math in 2007, while the percentage of White students scoring in the advanced level in math was 9.4% – a gap of 8.5 percentage points
- this “excellence gap” in 8th grade math has widened since 1996, when the gap between the percentages of African-American and White students scoring in the advanced level of math was only 4.9 percentage points
- the scale score of low-income students scoring at the 90th percentile in 8th grade reading was 288, while the scale score of non-low-income students scoring at the 90th percentile in 8th grade reading was 309, a difference of 21 points (10-12 points on NAEP is roughly equivalent to one grade level, so a difference of 21 points means that the highest achieving low-income students are about two grade levels behind the highest achieving non-low-income students)
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