Effects of Success for All on TAAS Reading Scores

Abstract

The statewide data for Texas reported here show that Success for All schools are significantly and substantially closing the gap in TAAS reading performance between themselves and the far less impoverished schools in the rest of the state. The authors found this to be particularly true for African American and Hispanic students, for whom the gap with white students closed significantly more than it did for African American and Hispanic students in other schools throughout the state. SUCCESS for All (SFA) is a comprehensive reform model for elementary schools, especially schools that qualify for Title I schoolwide funding. Begun in 1987 in one inner-city school in Baltimore, Success for All is now operating in more than 1,800 schools in 49 states, as well as in five foreign countries. In fall 2000, about one million children were in schools implementing Success for All. An important strength of Success for All - and a key to its rapid growth - is the amount and quality of the research done to evaluate the program.1 Studies in 12 school districts have compared SFA to matched control schools on individually administered measures of reading, especially the Woodcock, Durrell, and Gray informal reading inventories.2 These have reported that, on average, SFA schools have exceeded controls on these measures by approximately 50% of a standard deviation - or, in grade-equivalents, approximately 2.5 months in first grade, increasing to 1.1 years by fifth grade. These effects have been particularly positive for the lowest-achieving students, and the program has had a profound effect on reducing special education placements and retention.3 In addition to research using student-level data and individually administered measures, several have found positive effects of Success for All on a variety of standardized and norm-referenced measures used in state accountability programs.4 In all, of thousands of elementary school children in dozens of schools and in a variety of settings have been published in the most selective journals in education, and they have consistently reported positive impacts of SFA on student achievement. A few have also reported atypical program impacts on student achievement. The balance of evidence would suggest that such results may be attributable to the quality of implementation, a variable known to be critical to all school reform efforts and one that is too often left unconsidered. Nonetheless, the rigor and variety of evidence indicating positive impacts of SFA on student achievement have established the effectiveness of the SFA program design well beyond the empirical standards typical of educational research. One review of 24 comprehensive school reform designs, conducted by the American Institutes of Research, found very few that had ever been compared to a control group.5 Only two, Success for All and Direct Instruction, met the highest standards for the rigor of their evaluations. A later compendium by the Thomas Fordham Foundation came to the same conclusion.6 Despite this research, some scholars have questioned the basic effectiveness of Success for All and the evidence that supports it, charging in particular that the majority of the were completed by Johns Hopkins researchers or their colleagues and that independent studies have found few benefits beyond the early grades, especially on the group-administered measures for which schools are increasingly held accountable. In this article, we use data (available on the Internet) from the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS). Such outcome data are often reported by program developers, but usually they have little scientific validity, since the data presented are for schools selected because they happened to have done well in a given year. Yet these standardized test scores are outcomes of greatest importance to educators. The present study deals with this problem of selection bias by including every school that began SFA from 1994 to 1997, a total of 111 schools, and comparing their gains from the year before SFA to 1998. …