The school accountability movement is leaving the nation's most gifted students behind, according to a report released yesterday by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

The report, "High-Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB," uses scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress to compare changes in the top 10 percent and the bottom 10 percent of students since the introduction of No Child Left Behind.

The good news is that NCLB seems to be making progress toward its goal of closing the "achievement gap," states the report: In fourth-grade reading, for example, NAEP scores for the bottom tenth increased 16 points from 2000 to 2007, compared to 3 points for the top tenth.

But what does the narrowing of that gap mean for students scoring at the top of the spectrum?

"The progress of our top students has been modest at best," said the report, noting that the focus of NCLB on bringing students to the "proficient" level might result in the neglect of gifted students who are already proficient.

"People can look at this data and say, 'This is great news,' and maybe that's what our national education policy should be," said Michael J. Petrilli, a vice president at the Fordham Institute. "But you see that the performance of the high-achieving students is languid, and the question is whether languid is going to cut it in a global economy."

At The Education Trust, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit dedicated to closing the achievement gap, vice president Amy Wilkins dismissed the study for its insistence that a focus on low-performing students necessarily harms high-performing students.

"The report sets up a false choice in the way that would make the reader believe that we have to make a choice as a country between equity and excellence," she said. "Our policies need to marry both -- we need excellence for all students."

While excellence for all is a noble goal in theory, Mr. Petrilli argued that in practicality, teachers must make a choice in whom they give the most attention.

In a national survey of 900 teachers that was also part of the report, 80 percent said that struggling students are the most likely to get one-on-one attention from teachers, versus 5 percent who say academically advanced students are likely to get such attention.

"Let's be honest that we are prioritizing low achievement over our best and brightest," he said, "and let's have a national conversation over whether this is the best way to go."

The report tied its test score data to NCLB only by time period, and did not conclusively state that the implementation of the federal law had directly caused the score differences.

The report did, however, examine states that adopted accountability systems prior to NCLB and found that their low-achieving students also achieved at a faster rate than high-achieving students.

Ann Shoplik, director of the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Talented Elementary Students, said that she has noticed a difference in attention given to gifted children since the passage of NCLB.

"Everyone's glad that [gifted students] are getting these high test scores, but there's no emphasis on how can we challenge them," she said. "That's not the focus anymore."

She believes that because of the amount of testing now required by NCLB, schools are more reluctant to send their students off for additional testing to see if they qualify for gifted programs.

The number of students being recommended to be tested for the Carnegie Mellon program has decreased from between 2,600 and 3,000 six years ago to about 1,500 this year, she said.

That said, she's seeing a greater demand for programs from parents who say that their children aren't being challenged in school.

Donna Benson, a past president of the Pennsylvania Association for Gifted Education, said that in her experience, the problem presents itself more at the elementary school level than in high schools.

"Especially elementary students, they don't learn to study because everything comes too easy," she said. "I'm not saying that we shouldn't be accountable, but we need to watch what we're doing and really think through what we're doing to the higher-ability kids."

One solution, said Mr. Petrilli, might come from changing NCLB to give schools extra credit when their students score "advanced," rather than just crediting them for proficient scores.

"Accountability systems have all been designed to get students over a low bar," he said. "There's no incentive to encourage schools to move the kids to the next level."