ABSTRACT
Academic expectations are a central developmental reality for children living in industrial and information age societies. Academic expectations are set in a social context that emphasizes normative rates of progress and comparative levels of achievement for keystone skills and performance on high-stakes assessments (Ditkowsky & Koonce, 2010). It can be argued reasonably that students do not have academic performance deficits in any absolute sense. All students are performing at the level one should expect, given their genetic endowment, motivation, prior skills, the quality of instruction they receive, and their family/community support. Viewed from this perspective, behavior per se is neither wrong nor right, but is the expression of one’s cumulative experiences (Skinner, 1953). Academic deficits are a mismatch between students’ current levels of academic performance and expectations for peers. The large number of children who are identified as exhibiting academic deficits is a foreseeable feature of any developmental system that sets expectations based on normative comparisons at specific points in time and normative expectations for rates of progress between those times (Nese, Park, Alonzo, & Tindal, 2011; Zigmond & Kloo, 2009). By definition, one in 10 students will always be in the bottom 10% of performers, and half of all students will always be behind the average student in acquiring any skill. These normative statistical realities are evident throughout our educational landscape in areas such as the rate of referral to special education (Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services [OSERS], December 2011).
