The Effectiveness of the Title I Compensatory Education Program: 1965-1997

Abstract

We examine the nature and quality of some of the most prominent evaluations of Title I over the past 3 decades. The early assessments conducted in the late 1960s and early 1970s were plagued by a host of inadequacies of both programmatic implementation and evaluation designs and procedures. These flawed assessments suggested that Title I was not meeting its fundamental mandate of eliminating the large achievement gaps between high-poverty students and their less-disadvantaged peers. Beginning in the mid- 1970s and continuing periodically to the present, a series of large-scale, national evaluations of the program has been conducted. The earliest of these studies revealed that Title I was modestly enhancing the math and reading achievement of moderately disadvantaged students hut was failing to improve the relative performance of the most needy segment of the Title I population. Further, such effects typically "faded out" as students progressed through school. Finally, the evidence indicates that the program was not cost effective in that no relation existed between programmatic costs and achievement gains. However, in the past decade, evaluation studies, conducted at both the national and local levels, indicate that a variety of local programs, especially comprehensive, school-wide models, have evolved that provide convincing evidence of at least limited effectiveness of Title I. The hallmarks of such models are clear goals; methods and materials linked to the goals; continuous assessment of student progress; well-specified programmatic components, materials, and professional development procedures; and dissemination of results by organizations that focus on quality of implementation.