A new analysis of U.S. performance on the international PISA exam in mathematics shows significant declines for students at the top and middle of the achievement distribution from 2003 to 2006.* This is the strongest evidence to date that the performance of America’s highest-achieving students dropped during the early years of No Child Left Behind’s implementation. It’s impossible to know whether the federal law caused this trend, but it’s plausible that the pressure NCLB placed on schools to raise the scores of their lowest performing students encouraged them to give less attention to students in the middle and at the top....Read it here.
