Top 5 Advance stories from 2024
Thank you, dear readers, for your interest in advanced education. Happy holidays—and here’s to hoping 2025 is a good one for you, our country, and our students!
As the year comes to an end, it’s clear that advanced education is in an interesting and complicated place. At that heart of this is the need to accomplish something very difficult: balance high achievement and the structures that produce it with vital efforts to address historical and systemic inequalities. The articles that follow—the five most-read stories on Advance in 2024—reflect this tension. School leaders, teachers, education companies, and parents all demonstrate that they care about both, and that they’re trying to find that balance—with mixed success. This is, of course, to be expected. But it also suggests that much more work is needed in 2025 and beyond.
In the meantime, take a look at what resonated most with you all over the last twelve months. The summaries all pull from the articles themselves, so credit—and a big thank you—to all of Advance’s many fantastic contributors!
5. Advanced education programs are important to parents, poll finds, by Alli Aldis, July 19, 2024
In a poll conducted this summer by EdChoice and Morning Consult, nearly two-thirds of all school parents (63 percent) said that it’s very or extremely important for their child’s school to offer advanced academic classes. Private school parents place even more importance on gifted education being offered, with 77 percent saying it’s at least very important. It’s clear that school parents want class options that suit their children’s academic needs.
4. Gifted under-identification: How to improve diverse student access to gifted programming, by Jonathan Klingeman, January 31, 2024
As the population of English learners (ELs) in grades K–12 grows, so do the challenges school districts face in identifying advanced students and putting in place appropriate enrichment and acceleration opportunities for them. There is also a history of racial and ethnic inequality, with disproportionate identification of Black, Hispanic, and Native American students. Here are three best practices for district to ensure that all students have access to advanced programming.
3. NYC’s advanced education gap: Why are middle schoolers being given short shrift?, by Alina Adams, December 11, 2024
New York City is awash in high-achieving public school students who would benefit from advanced education. In some neighborhoods, for example, over 50 percent of students test in the top 10th percentile nationwide. And to the city’s credit, there are programs in elementary, middle, and high school designed to help maximize these students’ education. There is one big problem, however—scarcity—and nowhere is that scarcity worse than in middle school.
2. Why schools are failing to narrow excellence gaps in math, by Jeff Murray and Brandon Wright, February 21, 2024
Marginalized students have long lacked access to advanced education programs in the U.S., compared to more advantaged peers, and have been underidentified and therefore underserved when such programs exist. Research also suggests that these “opportunity” and “excellence” gaps—nearly ubiquitous in elementary, middle, and high schools—are worsening post-pandemic due to learning interruptions that were experienced unequally by low-income, Black, Hispanic, and Native American children. RAND Corporation’s multi-year American Mathematics Educator Study recently shed further light on these problems.
1. The Great Recalibration of AP exams, by John Moscatiello, July 12, 2024
The Advanced Placement program is undergoing a radical transformation. Over the last three years, the College Board has “recalibrated” nine of its most popular AP Exams so that approximately 500,000 more AP Exams will earn a 3+ score this year than they would have without recalibration. If this process continues in other exams in the coming years, approximately 1,000,000 more AP Exams every year will earn a 3+ score. This post, 2024’s most-read, explains why the College Board is changing AP scores and what these changes will mean for AP teachers and students in the coming years.
Thank you, dear readers and writers, for your interest in advanced education. Happy holidays—and here’s to hoping 2025 is a good one for you, our country, and our students!