Has nothing to do with poor/rich districts. It's within each school. The teachers spend more time (aka more money) dealing with poor performing students rather than spending more time with the better students.

He's saying resources are spent on the worst performing students. For example, classroom time spent getting the lowest performing students to pass the (relatively low) bar set by statewide exams.

That’s also nonsense, unless you’re talking about extra staff time spent on imposing power/discipline on people who don’t want to be there. In which case, sure... but what else would you propose the schools do? (Also, this doesn’t tend to help the students being disciplined all that much, in my limited anecdotal experience as an outside observer.)

Some students get extra support because they have disabilities or need extra language instruction. This is not about poor performance, per se, but rather about giving extra support to specific groups of students who obviously need it. This usually relates to state/federal law.

But your run-of-the-mill poorly performing student is given woefully inadequate support by understaffed and underfunded schools, just like everyone else. The way to fix this problem is by improving teacher pay, giving teachers more time during the schoolday but outside the classroom for self improvement and collaboration, properly supplying schools and fixing their facilities, and giving teachers more local autonomy and less bullshit standardized tests.

The best performing students tend to get tracked into special classes (“honors”, “AP”, etc.), have more direct relationships with teachers, are members of school-organized extracurricular activities, and so on. They speak up more often in class, interact with other academically motivated students. Perhaps most importantly, they generally have more considerably more external support (family help from better educated parents with more free time, private tutoring, out-of-school music/art/sport/etc. training, and so on).

NCLB set minimum performance requirements for basic skills. It tied school's funding directly to the performance of its lowest achieving students. In my personal experience, teachers regularly stopped their regular curriculum and focused exclusively on test prep in the weeks leading up to the statewide exams. Even in honors classes, where you'd expect every student to demonstrate basic reading and math proficiency, we stopped our normal studies and did test prep.

Did this have an negative impact on gifted program funding? Some educators definitely believe it did.

"In particular, NCLB does not require any programs for gifted, talented, and other high-performing students. Federal funding of gifted education decreased by a third over the law's first five years ... In other states, such as Michigan, state funding for gifted and talented programs was cut by up to 90% in the year after the Act became law."

I'd be surprised that teachers in advanced programs would actually stop to focus on state exams or NCLB type tests? Back when I went through IB (over 20 years ago, granted), the state test was almost an afterthought. Most of the people in those programs if I recall breezed through those tests in no time, and had the remainder half a day or so to leisurely do what they want. (Obviously instead a lot more time was spent preparing for the IB and AP exams).

Half-baked measures like NCLB (eg, make schools "accountable" and they will somehow improve magically) does nothing to resolve the "environment gap", which in my opinion is probably one of the most critical factors in academic performance these days.