How Many Students Are Above Grade Level?
Numbers to cite when someone says advanced learners are too rare to serve.
Status quo defenders often try to minimize the harm done to advanced students by insisting that they are some teeny tiny logistically-impossible-to-serve subset of the general education classroom.
This damaging assumption - that it’s rare to be above grade level - is far from the truth.
The truth has been demonstrated repeatedly: millions of American students are already above grade level in at least one subject, as much as 35% of any given class.
Yes, even post-Covid!
Consider the evolution of above grade level prevalence evidence over the past 10 years:
How Can So Many Students Be Invisible? Large Percentages of American Students Perform Above Grade Level (2016)
This Johns Hopkins School of Education report throws down the gauntlet with some baseline facts: some ~21–45% of American elementary and middle school students read at least one grade level ahead and 11–44% are ahead a level or more at math.
Makel, Matthews, Peters, Rambo-Hernandez, and Plucker got these numbers by examining California, Wisconsin, and Florida students in grades 3-8 (as well as as national data from 5th graders taking the NWEA MAP test).
These above-level students aren’t just in high-income enclaves… they’re all over the place.
Should Millions of Students Take a Gap Year? Large Numbers of Students Start the School Year Above Grade Level. (2017)
The same team published the peer-reviewed version in Gifted Child Quarterly the next year.
With adjusted data sources (dropped Florida, added Texas, grades 3-7 plus the 5th grade MAP), corroborating numbers came in at 20–49% of students above grade level in ELA and 14–37% in math.
Millions of Students Are (Still) Above Grade Level: Achievement and Achievement Variability in Mathematics and Reading Before and During COVID-19 in the United States (2024)
The 2024 follow-up by Rambo-Hernandez, Makel & Koehler uses a larger dataset over a narrower scope (fifth grade only, one assessment with hundreds of thousands of students per cohort).
Even mid-COVID, ~35% of fifth graders scored above grade level in ELA and ~9% in math.
Millions of American Students Are Above Grade Level Right Now
Even assuming that advanced high schoolers are well-served already (debatable…) that means ~37 MILLION American students are currently attending elementary schools and middle schools that rarely offer coherent acceleration policies.
And, even assuming that all the advanced reading students are also advanced at math, that means as many as 13 MILLION American students are a year ahead (or more) of what schools are ostensibly teaching them.
Consider, for reference, the sizes of these other special interest groups:
3.3 million: Public school students enrolled in “gifted & talented programs”
5.3 million: English language learners
7.5 million: Students with disabilities served under IDEA
The number of students working above grade level dwarfs other groups, but the former group receives almost no particular attention or funding.
“Gifted” enrichment programs (just 3.3 million students served) may actually detract from the larger goal of appropriate curriculum more than they support it!
When someone tries to tell you that advanced students are a tiny and irrelevant minority, please set them straight.
While gifted students are everywhere, the uneven distribution creates problems that have, so far, been tough to solve. Small rural schools won't always have the experience or know-how to support gifted students even when they want to, and parents aren't always interested in the online versions of curriculum that get offered. I'm optimistic that as those tools improve and awareness spreads, the services provided in smaller rural schools will better support gifted kids. Have you seen any specific cases where rural schools are doing a better job of supporting gifted students?