Success for All (A school-wide reform program, primarily for high-poverty elementary schools, with a strong emphasis on reading instruction)

Randomized controlled trial shows positive impact in raising school-wide reading achievement in grades K-2.

Full disclosure: The Coalition’s Research Director, Jonathan Crane, was an advisor to the study described below.  However, he was not involved in this review.

Description of the intervention:  Success for All is a comprehensive school-wide reform program, primarily for high-poverty elementary schools, with a strong emphasis on early detection and prevention of reading problems before they become serious.  The non-profit Success for All Foundation is the program provider, supplying all curriculum materials, training, and professional development to schools that adopt the program.

At the beginning of each school year, and every eight weeks thereafter, each Success for All school assesses the reading ability of all students using a standardized reading test.  The test results are used to: (1) form reading classes made up of students of all ages who read at the same grade level; (2) identify struggling students in need of tutoring; and (3) monitor student reading growth.  Specially-trained, certified teachers or paraprofessionals in the school provide the struggling students with one-on-one tutoring in daily, 20-minute sessions until they are reading at their age-appropriate grade level.

Students spend most of the school day in their traditional age-grouped classes, but are regrouped into the above reading classes for daily, 90-minute lessons.  In grades K-1, these lessons focus on language development (e.g., reading stories to students and having them re-tell), teaching students the distinct sounds that make up words (i.e. phonemic awareness), blending sounds to form words, and developing reading fluency.  The grades 2-6 curriculum builds on these initial skills to develop students’ reading comprehension and writing skills, largely through cooperative learning activities.  During these activities, students work together in teams or pairs, and receive positive team recognition (e.g. certificates, teacher praise) for successfully completing reading activities.  Students at all grade-levels are also required to read for 20 minutes every night.

To insure staff “buy-in” to the program, the Success for All Foundation typically requires that 80% of a school’s teachers vote to adopt the program before it can be implemented.  The school principal then designates one teacher to serve as a facilitator who supports teachers to improve the quality of their implementation of the program.  In addition, the school establishes a school-wide planning and problem-solving group that works toward a positive school climate, high attendance, and parent involvement, and handles teachers’ referrals of individual student problems (e.g., poor reading progress, or social/behavioral problems).

The Foundation provides teachers and staff in the school with three days of pre-implementation training, as well as considerable ongoing professional development (including 18 days in the first year); and conducts quarterly visits to monitor the school’s progress in increasing reading achievement.

As of the 2003-2004 school year, 1300 schools in 48 states were using Success for All.  Implementing the program in grades K-5 typically costs $95,000 per elementary school in the first year, with the cost dropping to $35,000 in the second year and $25,000 in the third.

Click here for the Success for All Foundation website.

Evidence of Effectiveness

Study

Randomized controlled trial of 41 high-poverty elementary schools across the country that voted in favor of adopting Success for All.  These schools were randomly assigned either to a group that implemented Success for All in grades K-2 or a control group that did not.  56% of students at these schools were African-American, 10% were Hispanic, and 72% were eligible for federally subsidized lunches.

Effects of Success for All on 2nd grade reading achievement school-wide, at the three-year follow-up (versus the control schools):

The effects shown below apply to the entire second grade in Success for All schools.  Approximately 40% of the second-grade students had been exposed to Success for All for all three years of the study (i.e. in grades K-2), while the other 60% enrolled in Success for All schools during the study, and thus had less exposure to the program.

On average, second graders at Success for All schools:

• Scored higher in word attack skills than approximately 64% of their counterparts at control group schools (i.e. an effect size of .36 standard deviations).  Click here for a glossary of terms.
• Scored higher in word identification skills than approximately 60% of their counterparts at control group schools (i.e. an effect size of .24 standard deviations).  Click here for a glossary of terms.
• Scored higher in passage comprehension than approximately 58% of their counterparts at control group schools (i.e. an effect size of .21 standard deviations).  Click here for a glossary of terms.

Discussion of study quality (click here for a glossary of terms)

• The study had low-to-moderate attrition of schools, and a long-term follow-up:  Test scores were collected for students in 85% of sample schools at the three-year follow-up.  (Of the six schools lost at follow-up, five closed due to insufficient enrollment and one dropped the Success for All model due to local political problems and refused to participate in data collection.)
• This was a large study conducted in typical high-poverty public schools, thus providing evidence of Success for All’s effectiveness in real-world public school settings.
• The study measured outcomes using an intention to treat analysis.
• Prior to the intervention, there were no systematic differences between Success for All and control schools in their kindergarteners’ demographic characteristics or scores on tests of pre-reading ability.
• The study measured reading outcomes using well-established, standardized tests administered to the entire second grade (namely, the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test-Revised, subtests on word attack, word identification, and passage comprehension).
• These tests were administered by trained testers who were unaware of whether students attended Success for All or control schools.
• Study Limitation:  Because many students moved in and out of sample schools during the study, one cannot rule out the possibility that such student turnover accounted for part of the effect on reading achievement (i.e., the possibility that Success for All schools attracted higher-achieving students, or caused the departure of lower-achieving students, rather than actually improving the achievement of the enrolled students).  However, statistical analyses indicate that those students moving in and out of Success for All schools were roughly equivalent in key characteristics to those moving in and out of control schools, making this “turnover” explanation unlikely.

Sources

Borman, Geoffrey D., Robert E. Slavin, Alan Cheung, Anne Chamberlain, Nancy Madden and Bette Chambers.  “Final Reading Outcomes of the National Randomized Field Trial of Success for All.”  Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, CA, 2006.  Click here for a link to this study.

Slavin, Robert E., Nancy A. Madden, Alan Cheung, Anne Chamberlain, Bette Chambers, and Geoffrey Borman.  “The National Randomized Field Trial of Success for All: Second-Year Outcomes.”  American Educational Research Journal. Vol. 42, No. 4, 2005, pp. 673-696.  Click here for a link to this study.

Borman, Geoffrey D., Robert E. Slavin, Alan Cheung, Anne Chamberlain, Nancy Madden and Bette Chambers.  “Success for All: First-Year Results from the National Randomized Field Trial.”  Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. Vol. 27, No. 1, 2005, pp. 1-22.  Click here for a link to this study.