Prospects: Final Report on Student Outcomes.

Abstract

Prospects: Final Report on Student Outcomes, by Michael J. Puma, Nancy Karweit, Cristofer Price, Anne Ricciuti, William Thompson, & Michael Vaden-Kiernan. Bethesda, MD: Abt Associates, 1997. 96 pp. (Available free from the Planning and Evaluation Service, U.S. Department of Education, 600 Independence Avenue., S.W., Washington, D.C. 20202-8240). Reviewed by Phyllis McClure, Independent Consultant, Washington, D.C.. In the 1988 Hawkins-Stafford Amendments that reauthorized 1 (now known as Title I), Congress commissioned a major longitudinal study of the effects of participation in the federal compensatory education program on achievement and other related educational outcomes. Prospects: Student Outcomes is the culminating report of that study. It summarizes the information gleaned from tracking a large, national sample of the same students in three grade cohorts from 1991 to 1994. Students were drawn from high-poverty schools (75% or more poor students) and low-poverty schools (25% or fewer poor students). Data were collected from student records, student profiles completed by teachers, student questionnaires, parent questionnaires, and reading/language arts and mathematics scores from the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills 4th edition (CTBS-4). Another volume, Prospects: The Congressionally Mandated Study of Educational Growth and Opportunity-Technical Report, provides a detailed description of the study design and implementation. The legislation also called for an interim report published in 1993, which contains extensive data on students in high-poverty schools, 1 students, districts, schools and classrooms, and language minority and limited-English-proficient students. Prospects: Student Outcomes presents its findings in straightforward, nontechnical prose divided into four chapters. The first of these is an introduction outlining the dimensions of the Prospects study, the history of 1, and characteristics of 1 participants. The second chapter, Did 1 Help Close the Gap? examines methodological issues, the relationship of test scores to school poverty level, and student outcomes for program participants. 3 focuses on the characteristics of high-performing high-poverty schools, those that foster academic achievement despite having high concentrations of economically disadvantaged students. The concluding chapter offers an exploratory analysis of factors associated with student achievement and growth over time. 1 services consisted of supplementary instruction offered for about 30 minutes a day, five days a week. This low intensity of extra assistance was expected to compensate for the large achievement gap. Program participants were by definition and requirement the lowest achieving students. Although the purpose of the program was to improve educational outcomes for these students, Prospects concludes that, as operated prior to its 1994 reform, Chapter 1 assistance did not reduce the initial gap in academic achievement between participating and nonparticipating students. Where children start out compared to their classmates largely explains their relative academic standing in later grades (p. 41). Using CTBS-4 national norms and the criterion-referenced test data provided by the test publisher, the study found that the majority of students could not master the reading and mathematics skills expected of them at their respective grade levels. Students in highpoverty schools were far less likely to master grade-level skills than were students in low-poverty schools. The performance gap was generally larger in higher order skills than in more basic competencies. Even when controlling for a variety of student, family, school, and classroom variables, the study found that: (a) students receiving 1 assistance scored below nonparticipating students, (b) students who had more intense assistance tested below those who received less help, and (c) 1 did not, over time, close the performance gap between economically disadvantaged students and their more advantaged peers. …