Is Success for All (SFA) the leading example of evidence-based education in America or is it all smoke and mirrors? In a long story in Sunday's Washington Post Magazine, Jay Mathews traces the history of SFA and describes how this instructional program came to be used in 1500 schools despite the fact that many teachers hate its regimentation and one researcher, Stanley Pogrow, has made it his mission to debunk any claims of success made by its developers, Robert Slavin and Nancy Madden. Unlike most instructional programs and "whole school reforms," there exist for SFA a number of studies showing that the average student taught using SFA outperforms his or her peers in a control group, often by a large margin. But what Pogrow points out is that these SFA students are often still far below grade level and fall farther behind as time passes. While the debates between Slavin and Pogrow in the pages of Phi Delta Kappan and other education magazines may appear to be methodological disputes over how to measure the effectiveness of an education intervention, Mathews notes that without agreement on what will count as evidence of a program "working" there can be no meaningful discussion of how to fix schools. And policymakers will have to decide "whether to celebrate or condemn modest gains from programs like SFA when there is no concrete evidence that any other general approach-with the possible exception of preliminary efforts in a few schools-has done any better." "Success for Some," by Jay Mathews, The Washington Post Magazine, July 21, 2002
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Jay Mathews