The highest performing student groups continue to show learning in mathematics all the way through graduation, but the lowest performance levels seem to stagnate in middle school.
If you portray this in terms of gains, it becomes clear that students gain at similar rates, right up until they leave elementary school and choice starts entering the picture.
In reading, the situation is similar, but there's far more differentiation early on.
This makes sense to me, because reading also allows children much more choice from an earlier point, too.
Portrayed in absolute terms, the reading scores look like this:
For the bottom performers, learning stops remarkably early.
Everywhere outside of the top, the pace of learning seems to diminish so much that it might be hard to justify keeping low-performing kids in school in those later grades, at least if the goal is teaching them.
It would be nicer if, even if there was a growing variance in student achievement (as there is), those low-performers kept learning. But I'm not sure if that's something school systems can actually be set up to do, at least within reason.
Maybe teach them something else!
Source: teach.mapnwea.org/impl/normsRese…
Archive: web.archive.org/web/2024082709…
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