‘90/10’ gap between high-achieving and low-achieving students continues widening, study concludes

Forget the haves and have-nots – in today’s world, the greatest divide may be coming between the learned and the unlearned.

“Education leaders have warned of the trend toward increasing educational inequality for much of the last decade,” lamented Kevin Mahnken for The 74, noting a recent study from Brown University’s Annenberg Institute.

“In the vast majority of schools around the United States, the academic gap between the highest- and lowest-achieving students has grown significantly since 2005 … . The divergence was largely driven by stagnation among struggling students, which turned into steep learning losses during the (COVID-19) pandemic.”

‘We expect and hope our public schools will be great equalizers’

Study researchers focused on the “90/10 gap,” which refers to the difference in scores between the 90th percentile and 10th percentile of test takers for the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

“Their estimates show that the academic gaps grew fastest in public schools,” Mahnken wrote. “In each of the two decades between 2005 and 2024, scores for fourth graders at the 90th percentile increased by about four points in math and three points in reading; 10th-percentile scores dropped by roughly three and five points, respectively, resulting in a net disparity that was seven points larger in both subjects.”

Patrick Wolf, an author of the paper and economist at the University of Arkansas, called the study’s conclusions “demoralizing.”

“We expect and hope our public schools will be great equalizers and will reduce gaps between the top performers and the low performers, or the rich and the poor,” he said. “But over the last 20 years, we don’t see that in the data, and the gap has grown by a lot.”

Public-school advocates often cite “pandemic learning loss” as one of the reasons for lackluster student performance.

However, longitudinal studies such as this one show the problem has persisted since the start of this century.

“Strikingly, the 90/10 gap for both sectors swelled even in the years preceding the pandemic,” Mahnken observed. “Those gaps, leading up to 2019, reflected both steady growth from children at the top of the heap, along with a lack of progress — and, in some cases, pre-COVID learning loss — from those at the bottom.”

Although underperforming students saw “significant progress” in narrowing the 90/10 gap before the mid-2010s, “the years since 2013 have been marked by a pronounced reversal of those gains,” according to the article.

“By definition, there will always be a gap between the students performing at the 90th percentile and students performing at the 10th percentile,” Wolf said. “But we don’t want it to be wide, and we don’t want it to be getting wider.”