Comer School Development Program Research Articles

Pioneer of Education Reform to Present Distinguished Psychiatrist Lecture

Back to table of contents Next article Annual MeetingFull AccessPioneer of Education Reform to Present Distinguished Psychiatrist LectureMark MoranMark MoranSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:26 Feb 2019https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2019.3a38AbstractThe Comer Process is not a project or add-on, but rather an operating system—a way of managing, organizing, coordinating, and integrating programs and activities within a school around the principles of child development to foster an atmosphere of learning. “For years we have known that principles of child development are critical to everything that individuals, families, and communities need to thrive,” said psychiatrist James Comer, M.D., M.P.H., in an interview with Psychiatric News. “We know it, but we don’t teach it, and we don’t use those principles to create schools that promote healthy development.”James Comer, M.D., M.P.H., is a pioneer in educational reform who set out to integrate the principles of child and adolescent development with academic learning.Yale UniversityComer, possibly the most influential figure today in educational reform, will elaborate on his impatience for school reform in a Distinguished Psychiatrist Lecture at this year’s Annual Meeting in San Francisco, titled, “Why Are We Still Waiting? Resistance to Prevention and Promotion With Mental Health Issues.”Comer is the Maurice Falk Professor of Child Psychiatry at the Yale University Child Study Center. In 1968, he founded the Comer School Development Program (SDP), an innovative school reform initiative that integrates the principles of child and adolescent development with academic learning. The program has improved the educational environment in more than 1,000 schools throughout the country. In 2014 President Barack Obama appointed Comer to his Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence.The Comer SDP does not impose an intervention on a pilot school but rather relies on the stakeholders within the school—parents, children, teachers, and administration—to develop an organic model of change that facilitates student engagement, development, and learning.According to the website of the Yale Child Study Center, the Comer Process is not a project or add on, but rather an operating system—a way of managing, organizing, coordinating, and integrating programs and activities.“Three teams—the School Planning and Management Team (SPMT), the Student and Staff Support Team (SSST), and the Parent Team—work together to create a Comprehensive School Plan (CSP); to design and conduct staff development aligned with the goals of the Comprehensive School Plan; and to assess and modify the plan as necessary using a wide range of student- and school-level data to ensure that the school is continuously improving,” according to the website. “The teams are guided by three principles: decision making by consensus, no-fault problem solving, and collaboration. The process fosters positive school and classroom climate and creates optimal conditions for teaching and learning, and emphasizes the alignment of curriculum, instruction, and assessment.”In comments to Psychiatric News, Comer said that most schools focus only on the mechanical aspects of learning—memorize and regurgitate—while disregarding the social, emotional, and relational aspects of education.“The problem is that we have ignored the environment and the dynamics of child development,” he said. “What we have done [with SDP] is to focus on creating an environment that, to the extent possible, focuses not on what is wrong with kids, but what they need to function well in society.”When asked why there is such resistance to change, Comer replied: “The privileged don’t want to change, and that’s built into the system. It’s not a matter of taking from the privileged but creating a balance that works for most of the people most of the time.”Comer recalled that he started out training to be a generalist. But so many of the problems he saw afflicting patients lay outside the purview of standard clinical care—they were social and environmental in nature.This realization is what led him to psychiatry, then to child psychiatry, the Yale Child Study Center, and public health. Comer said he is pleased that APA is making that same realization about the social determinants of public health problems, as reflected in many of the sessions planned for this year’s Annual Meeting. ■“Why Are We Still Waiting: Resistance to Prevention and Promotion With Mental Health Issues” will be held Monday, May 20, from 3 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. ISSUES NewArchived

Mejora escolar, liderazgo y reforma sistémica: una retrospectiva (School improvement, leadership and systemic reform: a retrospective)

Mejora escolar, liderazgo y reforma sistémica: una retrospectiva (School improvement, leadership and systemic reform: a retrospective)

Against the majoritarian story of school reform: The Comer schools evaluation as a critical race counternarrative

AbstractCritical race theory (CRT) is a relatively new theory that has been little used in evaluation practice. The authors explore an example of critical race evaluation working with James Comer's School Development Program. In this evaluation common tropes associated with CRT were used to construct a counternarrative of school reform. The authors conclude that CRT has a place in evaluation, but that it also makes some demands on evaluators and those being evaluated that may make it less likely to be used than other theories. © Wiley Periodicals, Inc., and the American Evaluation Association.

Maintaining Excellence While Managing Transitions: Norman S. Weir Revisited

In a national education climate where change is the only constant, Norman S. Weir Elementary School has maintained and expanded the reform efforts that have resulted in striking academic achievement and improved school climate. Despite changes in administration and staffing, a highly professional and committed staff has continued the implementation of the Comer School Development Program and sustained Weir as an outstanding intellectual and social development learning community.

When Implementation Threatens Impact: Challenging Lessons From Evaluating Educational Programs

For more than 3 decades, researchers have catalogued, described, and analyzed educational program implementation. As a result of this tradition, current wisdom and conventions of sound practice now recognize the value of studying implementation, both as a subject of interest in its own right and as a source of useful information about program impact as well. In this article, the authors focus attention on the relationship between meaningful program implementation and their capacity to assess the impact of James P. Comer's School Development Program (SDP) in a large-scale study. The evaluation of the SDP under discussion, which was initially designed to assess variability in implementation and impact, ultimately examined only implementation-and not by choice, but rather by necessity-because the introduction of the SDP as a viable reform strategy had either stopped altogether or had progressed at a much more leisurely pace than planned. The authors outline the many facets of implementation that had slowed down or gone awry, and they describe subsequent studies that benefited from their experiences with this first SDP study. Although field-driven realities will always play a deservedly central role in the evaluation of school-based programs, the authors offer a set of recommendations to funders and policymakers about how implementation challenges might be better anticipated and managed.

Comer's School Development Program in Chicago: A Theory-Based Evaluation

Using fifth through eighth-grade students, the Comer School Development Program was evaluated in 10 inner city Chicago schools over 4 years, contrasting them with nine randomly selected no-treatment comparison schools. Comer schools implemented more program details than the controls but were not faithful to all program particulars. Students' ratings of the school's social climate improved soon after the program began. By the last 2 study years, both the students' and teachers' perceptions of the school's academic climate had also improved relative to the control schools. By these last years, Comer schools had gained about 3 percentile points more than the controls in both reading and math and students reported less acting out on a scale whose items are correlated with more serious offending in later life. Students in Comer schools also endorsed more conventional norms about misbehaving and reported greater ability to control their anger. However, the Comer program did not benefit either students' mental health or their participation in activities that adults consider wholesome. Explanations for the achievement and acting out results are offered based on student and staff data about school climate, on insights from an ethnography conducted in the program schools, and on contrast with the evaluation results from Prince George's County MD, where a different variant of the program failed to achieve any positive outcomes.

Comer's School Development Program in Chicago: A Theory-Based Evaluation

Using fifth through eighth-grade students, the Comer School Development Program was evaluated in 10 inner city Chicago schools over 4 years, contrasting them with nine randomly selected no-treatment comparison schools. Comer schools implemented more program details than the controls but were not faithful to all program particulars. Students' ratings of the school's social climate improved soon after the program began. By the last 2 study years, both the students' and teachers' perceptions of the school's academic climate had also improved relative to the control schools. By these last years, Comer schools had gained about 3 percentile points more than the controls in both reading and math and students reported less acting out on a scale whose items are correlated with more serious offending in later life. Students in Comer schools also endorsed more conventional norms about misbehaving and reported greater ability to control their anger. However, the Comer program did not benefit either students' mental health or their participation in activities that adults consider wholesome. Explanations for the achievement and acting out results are offered based on student and staff data about school climate, on insights from an ethnography conducted in the program schools, and on contrast with the evaluation results from Prince George's County MD, where a different variant of the program failed to achieve any positive outcomes.

The Dynamics of School Change: Response to the Article, “Comer's School Development Program in Prince George's County, Maryland: A Theory-Based Evaluation,” by Thomas D. Cook et al

The essential findings of Thomas Cook and colleagues in their article, "Comer's School Development Program in Prince George's County, Maryland: A Theory - Based Evaluation," are expressed in their abstract as follows: A randomized experiment of Comer's School Development Program was conducted in 23 middle schools .... [This study] showed that Comer schools implemented some [but not all] of the program's central elements better than control schools .... This shortfall in program implementation may have been responsible for students in the experimental schools not changing any more than controls. Quasi-experimental analyses showed that the program theory may be correct in many of its predictions about student changes .... However, achievement gains were found in schools with a more explicit academic focus, suggesting that improving this focus should be as central to Comer's program theory as improving a school's social climate. Even more needed, though, are ways to improve program implementability, the sine qua non for student change. The study, as conducted, was not an evaluation of the School Development Program (SDP) organization or the process. It was a limited study of the effects of one application of the SDP process: using an experimental control

Comer's School Development Program in Prince George's County, Maryland: A Theory-Based Evaluation

A randomized experiment of Comer's School Development Program was conducted in 23 middle schools in Prince George's County, Maryland. The school population is predominantly African American, with considerable internal variation in household socioeconomic standing. This study involved repeated measurement with more than 12,000 students and 2,000 staff a survey of more than 1,000 parents, and extensive access to student records. It showed that Comer schools implemented some of the program's central elements better than control schools, but not all or even most of them. This shortfall in program implementation may have been responsible for students in the experimental schools not changing any more than controls. Quasi-experimental analyses showed that the program theory may be correct in many of its predictions about student changes in psychological and social outcomes, but not achievement. However, achievement gains were found in schools with a more explicit academic focus, suggesting that improving this focus should be as central to Comer's program theory as improving a school's social climate. Even more needed, though, are ways to improve program implementability, the sine qua non for student change.

Comer's School Development Program in Prince George's County, Maryland: A Theory-Based Evaluation

Comer's School Development Program in Prince George's County, Maryland: A Theory-Based Evaluation

Race and Reform: Educational "Niche Picking" in a Hostile Environment

Historically, racist attitudes and policies among officials and citizens in the United States have influenced the effectiveness of educational reform efforts. Given that reality, this article describes an implementation of the Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) program within a broad sociopolitical context that includes a community's beliefs about intelligence, race, and academic achievement. AVID, designed to help low-income and minority high school students attend college; challenged this community's fundamental beliefs about academic success and subsequently met resistance from educators and community members who believed that intelligence is fixed and racially based. A case study approach was taken to explore how racism shapes educational reform in the local context and to identify ways to reverse its negative effects. In recent years, school reform efforts have focused increasingly on the strategies that educators in districts or schools have deployed to renew and improve their schools. Notable among these reform efforts are the Accelerated Schools program (Levin, 1987), the Comer School Development Program (Comer, 1980, 1988, 1997), and the Coalition of Essential Schools (Sizer 1992), which have been adopted and implemented throughout the country. These organizational development models emerged as antidotes to top-down models of school reform that were criticized for being insensitive to the obstacles and constraints facing teachers attempting to implement educational reforms. These models are heuristic because they show how educational innovations are negotiated in the practical, nitty-gritty details of daily life in schools. However, because their focus is on schoollevel strategies for self-renewal and improvement, they downplay the actions that initiated reform and the governmental, community, and district actions that occurred away from and before the school attempted rejuvenation and renewal (Datnow, Hubbard, & Mehan, 1999). Experts have called for locally adapted change that is sensitive to local education practice and context (Elmore, 1996; Elmore & McLaughlin, 1988; Fullan & Hargreaves, 1996; McLaughlin, 1990). As Goodman (1995) stated: What is most important [if we are to be truly transformative in schooling] ... is the recognition that school restructuring efforts be built upon an open discourse regarding the type of culture we wish to build and the relationship between schooling and this future society. (p. 7) Reform agents point out that efforts fail when they do not fully address the context in which the school is located or when they ignore the culture of the school (Sarason, 1996). Schools are political domains; therefore attention must be paid to the power that is embedded in all relationships that unfold therein (Datnow, 1998; Fullan, 1991; Giroux & McLaren, 1986; Hargreaves, 1994). The implementation of reform efforts is a conditional process in which the consequences of actions taken in one context may become the conditions for actions in another (Datnow et al., 1999; Hall & McGinty, 1997). On the one hand, in their exuberance to present the rich details of educational change in local contexts, educational researchers must not lose sight of the importance of actions taken in sociopolitical contexts that exist at a distance to the school. On the other hand, they cannot be content to treat sociopolitical factors as disembodied forces. The enactment of these factors in social interaction must be revealed and explained. In this article, we describe the implementation of a reform model aimed at improving the academic opportunity of African American youth in a community in a southern state. The purpose of this research is threefold: (a) to describe more fully the process by which this school implemented, incorporated, and enacted a reform design that was developed externally; (b) to explore more fully the dynamic relationship among structural constraints, cultural arrangements, and people's actions in the context of this school reform effort; and (c) to illustrate how cultural beliefs about race and intelligence become structural constraints impinging on educational reform. …

The Dynamics of School Change: Response to the Article, "Comer's School Development Program in Prince George's County, Maryland: A Theory-Based Evaluation," by Thomas D. Cook et al.

The Dynamics of School Change: Response to the Article, "Comer's School Development Program in Prince George's County, Maryland: A Theory-Based Evaluation," by Thomas D. Cook et al.

Mental Health in Schools

The Comer School Development Program (SDP) has received considerable national attention over the last decade. The authors describe the origins, central tenets, and principles of the SDP. Although the Comer model is a systemic one, one of its primary foci is the developmental and mental health needs of children attending urban schools. The authors illustrate how teaching and consulting school faculty and parents about basic principles of development and psychopathology change the interaction between the child and adults who are important to the child. The authors contend that this step is an essential prerequisite for effective evaluation and treatment of children with possible psychiatric disturbances.

Guest Editor's Introduction: Overview of the Comer School Development Program

The Comer School Development Program (SDP) is a child-centered, data-driven, whole-school change process. It was designed by James P. Comer, MD, to recreate a caring, nurturing, and challenging learning community, in which adults work collaboratively to address children's psychosocial and academic development. The Comer SDP has been effective in enhancing the climate in schools and in improving students' psychological, social, and academic performance.

A School Transformed: The Case of Norman S. Weir

Norman S. Weir Elementary School epitomizes the transformation that occurs when the Comer School Development Program is implemented well. The school has risen from one of the lowest achieving schools in the district to one of the highest achieving. The leadership of the principal, combined with the commitment of a highly professional and caring staff, transformed Norman S. Weir into an excellent academic and social development learning community.

School Development Program Effects: Linking Implementation to Outcomes

James Comer's educational philosophy and his ideas for school reform place child development and human relationships at the center of school change. These ideas, and the School Development Program (SDP) that he founded in 1968, have had considerable influence on school reform and school improvement strategies in the United States and abroad. The notion of creating and maintaining a caring and supportive community, in which the climate of the school supports the total development of the child, is fast becoming a universal aspect of school reform. Many schools across the country are now placing a greater focus on the nature and quality of their climate and on changing climate factors to enhance the development of their students. The result of this progression is that traditional evaluations comparing Comer SDP schools with other schools as non-SDP controls are no longer effective as an approach to studying SDP effects. A more meaningful and practical form of evaluation must now be utilized to pay closer attention to the quality of SDP implementation, the relationships between faithful replication of the SDP process and intervening and distal outcomes, and the varied contextual factors that can facilitate or restrain implementation.

Chapter VI: Service Learning in the Comer School Development Program

Chapter VI: Service Learning in the Comer School Development Program

Creating Safe and Caring School Communities: Comer School Development Program Schools

Norris M. Haynes, Yale Child Study Center, Yale University* This article asserts that schoolwide interventions have the greatest potential for buffering students from violence outside of schools and for preventing violence within schools. It examines critical aspects of one such intervention, the Comer School Development Program (SDP), and explores the ways in which this program directly and indirectly impacts both the level of violence in the school and children's, parents', teachers', and school administrators' responses to it. By embracing children within a web of prosocial relationships and activities, the SDP is shown as creating a safe haven that supports their healthy development, fosters optimal learning, and discourages interpersonal violence. INTRODUCTION The devastating effects of violence on children's development and psychosocial adjustment are widely evident in the increasing number of children being treated for violence-related trauma or themselves being accused of perpetrating acts of violence on others (BoneyMcCoy & Finkelhor, 1995; Garbarino, Dubrow, Kostelny, & Pardo, 1992). Virtually constant exposure to real violence in their homes and communities and simulated violence in the media have rendered many of our nation's youth violence-impacted and violence-prone. Gun-toting individuals, drive-by shootings, and drug-related homicides previously confined to lurid dramatizations in the media are now everyday occurrences and pervasive influences on many children's development (Children's Defense Fund, 1994). Indeed, Kotlowitz's (1991) ruminations on the pervasive violence he found in the lives of two small boys growing up in an impoverished urban neighborhood prompted him to assert that such children are being robbed of their childhood. He and others have maintained that the increase in violence may be related to the failure of our nation's social institutions, including its families and schools, to adequately address the psycho-emotional and educational needs of children in holistic and collaborative ways (Bey & Turner, 1996). Forced to grow up at an unnaturally accelerated rate in order to physically and psychologically fend off assaults on their inner and outer selves, these young people cannot succeed on their own. Nor can we as a nation succeed in protecting them and restoring balance and integrity to their childhood unless we form communities of support around them to buffer them against the scourge of community and domestic violence. Insufficient attention has been paid by educational researchers to the quality of the human interactions that occur between children and adults at school. These interactions contribute substantially to the overall social climate of the school, which encompasses the attitudes, values, and behavior of students, school personnel, parents, and community members toward each other and toward the activities and programs occurring at the school. A healthy school climate supports children's healthy development and facilitates their acquisition of the effective social and intellectual skills they need to survive and thrive. An unhealthy one leads to conflict between children, parents, and school personnel and makes children's social and intellectual development difficult, if at all possible. In 1993, researchers at the Comer School Development Program (SDP) of the Yale Child Study Center in New Haven, Connecticut, conducted a national survey of parent, staff, and student perceptions of school climate (Haynes, Emmons, & Comer, 1994). The sample was randomly selected from a national cross-section of 150 elementary, middle, and high schools. Of the 11,963 middle school students who completed this survey, 22% indicated that some of their schoolmates carry guns or knives to school. Forty-three percent responded that the children at their school fight a lot, and 42% noted that many children at their schools are suspended due to violent behavior. …

Young African American and Latino Children in High-Poverty Urban Schools: How They Perceive School Climate

This article reports findings of a study of third-graders' perceptions of school climate, a key variable of the Comer School Development Program. A self-report survey was individually administered to 1,000 African American and 260 Latino children participating in an evaluation of the Comer process; data were factor-analyzed. African American children viewed teacher-child relations as the most important dimension of school climate. For them, besides acknowledging best efforts, caring teachers listened to children and were available to comfort and help with school and personal problems. Latino children stressed teacher fairness, caring, and praise for effort as well as the importance of moral order. Both groups emphasized following school rules and performing well, values consistent with the Comer process. INTRODUCTION Several studies published during the Reagan-Bush years (1980-92) indicate that African American students in K-12 public schools are disproportionately represented in grade retentions, school suspensions, and dropout rates (Bennett & Harris,1981; Campbell,1982; Hess & Greer, 1987; Hess & Lauber, 1985; Kaufman, 1991). Similar findings have been reported for Latino children (Chapa & Valencia, 1993; Reyes & Valencia, 1993). These studies conclude that prior to leaving school during the adolescent years, these students are frequently poor academic achievers in the elementary grades and experience academic suspensions for related disciplinary problems. An important trend in the current research focusing on what and how children learn is an increasing appreciation for the overriding importance of developmental factors and continuity. However, this trend was not apparent when Kenneth Clark published Dark Ghetto in 1965. At that time, Clark perceived compensatory programs such as Project Head Start as having mistakenly blamed poor parents and families for their children's educational difficulties. The blame, he believed, fell squarely on school teachers and administrators for not assuming proper responsibility and accountability for the education of low-income and minority children. By 1991, Head Start had endorsed its Transition Project, which focuses on maintaining continuity between the Head Start preschool program and public elementary schools. As a result of this initiative, Head Start staff are trained to work proactively with primary grade teachers to facilitate children's successful entry to and adjustment in the primary grades (Kennedy, 1993). Increasingly, both elementary and secondary educators acknowledge the important role of family and community in the educative process as active, positive contributors inside and outside the classroom (Lightfoot, 1978; Slaughter-Defoe, 1991; Strickland & Ascher, 1992). It is far more common today for emphasis to be placed on the need for collaborative partnerships between schools and families at all grade levels in an effort to ameliorate the academic and learning challenges occasioned by deepening, chronic, and persistent poverty (Comer, 1988a, 1988b; McLoyd, 1990; Slaughter, 1988; Wilson, 1989). This dual focus on developmentally appropriate practices in the primary grades and collaborative relationships between children's teachers and families is entirely consistent with the approach to school reform advanced by the School Development Program (SDP) model developed by Dr. James P. Comer (1980, 1998a) at the Yale University Child Development Center. Comer originally piloted his model in public elementary schools serving primarily low-income minority children in New Haven, Connecticut, during the late 1970s. Reflecting on these early efforts, Comer (1980) notes: The New Haven School System itself developed a number of compensatory education programs. Head Start and Follow Through programs, designed to overcome learning lags, received considerable support.... We were fully aware that an education program could not correct what was wrong with Dixwell Avenue or low-income communities through the nation. …

The Comer School Development Program

Practice resting on theories of society, of needs, of social relationships: applications.