Equal Talents, Unequal Opportunities: A Report Card on State Support for Academically Talented Low-Income Students. Executive Summary
Author: Plucker, Jonathan
Date: 2015-03-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Academically Gifted,Low Income Students,Educational Policy,State Policy,Educational Indicators,Intervention,Demography,Poverty,Achievement Gap,Talent Development,Talent Identification,Barriers,Access to Education,Accountability

This report examines the performance of America's high-ability students, with an emphasis on those who come from low income backgrounds. The report examines a range of state-level interventions that are intended to foster academic talent, with the goal of identifying the policies currently in use that should be implemented more widely. Working with an expert advisory panel, the project team identified a range of indicators related to state level policy inputs and student outcomes. Ultimately, 18 indicators were included in the analyses, representing nine distinct state-level policies and nine specific student outcomes. All data were collected at the state level, as the authors believe that changes to state-level policies are most likely to improve the country's education of high-ability students, especially students from low-income families. States were then graded on both their policy interventions and their student outcomes. The initial results are not encouraging. Few states have comprehensive policies in place to address the education of talented students, let alone the education of high-performing students from low-income families. Without significant differences in state interventions to support advanced education, student performance outcomes at the advanced level appear to be normally distributed across states--as one would expect in the absence of attention to talent development. Data suggests a correlation between state demographics and outcomes--higher poverty states tend to have lower outcomes. Not surprisingly, large excellence gaps (differences in performance between low income and other students) exist in nearly all states. This is both unacceptable and incompatible with America's long-term prosperity. Yet there are reasons for optimism. Talent development is becoming a concern of policymakers, and many of the necessary policies identified by the expert panel and in the research literature are relatively low cost and easy to implement. To help states build on this groundwork, the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation plans to conduct this survey periodically, with an increasingly broadened set of indicators and data sources, to inform the national dialogue about how best to educate our most advanced students, especially those from low-income families. As a starting point the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation offers the following recommendations to states: (1) Make high-performing students highly visible; (2) Remove barriers that prevent high-ability students from moving through coursework at a pace that matches their achievement level; (3) Ensure that all high-ability students have access to advanced educational services; and (4) Hold local education agencies (LEAs) accountable for the performance of high ability students from all economic backgrounds. [For &quot;Equal Talents, Unequal Opportunities: A Report Card on State Support for Academically Talented Low-Income Students,&quot; see ED569953.]