Performance Trends of Top Students

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Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s latest study, "Do High Flyers Maintain Their Altitude? Performance Trends of Top Students," is the first to examine the performance of America’s highest-achieving children over time at the individual-student level. Produced in partnership with the Northwest Evaluation Association, it finds that many high-achieving students struggle to maintain their elite performance over the years and often fail to improve their reading ability at the same rate as their average and below-average classmates.

The study released today finds that 30 to 50 percent of America’s best students fail to maintain their elite performance over time. Analysts also find that high-achieving students fail to improve as quickly in reading as their low-achieving and average peers.

Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) analysts Yun Xiang, Michael Dahlin, John Cronin, Robert Theaker, and Sarah Durant authored the study, Do High Flyers Maintain Their Performance: Performance Trends of Top Students. They examined more than 120,000 students in 1,500+ schools located in most states. By following individual pupil progress in math and reading from third to eighth grade in one cohort, and from sixth to tenth grade in another, they were able to gauge the academic growth of the country’s highest achievers. The study sought to determine whether these “high flyers”—originally scoring at or above the 90th percentile— “maintain their altitude” over time? The answer? While most did, almost half did not.

The study raises troubling questions: Is our obsession with closing achievement gaps and “leaving no child behind” coming at the expense of our “talented tenth”—and America’s future international competitiveness?

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