Giving Compass' Take:

• This report from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation reveals a lack of success on the part of states in supporting academically talented low-income students and highlights policy alternatives to address this shortcoming.  

• How can you/your organization support policy changes of this nature? What unique circumstances must be considered when making changes of this nature in your community? 

• Read a donor's guide to workforce development. 

Year after year, in every state and community in our nation, students from low-income families are less likely than other students to reach advanced levels of academic performance, even when demonstrating the potential to do so. These income-based “excellence gaps” appear in elementary school and continue through high school. It is a story of demography predetermining destiny, with bright low-income students becoming what one research team referred to as a “persistent talent underclass.”

Low-income students, recently estimated to be roughly half of our public school population, are much less likely to achieve academic excellence or, when identified as high-ability, more likely to backslide as they progress through school. Recent studies highlight the numerous educational advantages students in higher-income families receive, from hearing more vocabulary words from their parents to taking part in extracurricular activities and attending schools with more experienced teachers and smaller class sizes. In light of these disparities, schools can play an important role in equalizing opportunities. Through educating the nation’s youth, our schools cultivate our next generation’s talent, and students who do well in school are more likely to become productive contributors to society. By setting state-wide policies encouraging excellence, states can encourage all schools to provide advanced learning opportunities for high-ability students. This report examines the performance of America’s high-ability students, with an emphasis on those who come from low-income backgrounds.

This 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 we 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. In this state policy vacuum, support for advanced learning rests on local districts, schools, and families. The opportunities available to low-income students are decidedly restricted and limiting.

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. Several states lead the nation in producing higher percentages of talented students, and many states appear to have the structures in place to begin addressing student talent development more effectively. 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, we offer 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.
  4. Hold LEAs accountable for the performance of high-ability students from all economic backgrounds.