Success for All specializes in whole-school turnaround for struggling elementary schools. Its 2010 proposal for an Investing in Innovation (i3) grant called for the program, whose primary goal is to ensure that every child learns to read well in elementary school, to grow from one thousand schools to more than two thousand. The Baltimore-based organization was one of only four to grab the shiniest brass ring in the i3 competition—a five-year, $50 million “scale-up” grant. Teach For America, KIPP, and the Reading Recovery program snared the other three.
This third and final report from MDRC looks at SFA’s impacts between kindergarten and second grade in five school districts over a three-year period covered under the i3 grant. A total of thirty-seven schools across five school districts were part of the study—nineteen randomly chosen to implement SFA, along with eighteen control schools that either stuck with their existing reading programs or choose new ones other than SFA.
The report finds that SFA is “an effective vehicle for teaching phonics,” showing statistically significant effects for second graders who were in SFA for all three years. SFA students also performed better than the average in reading fluency and comprehension, though not significantly. The report authors don’t say so, but the relative lack of traction on comprehension would seem to be of minor concern for K–2 since comprehension tends to be cumulative in nature—as vocabulary and background knowledge grows, so does comprehension. The most encouraging finding is SFA’s effectiveness with students who enter school with low pre-literacy skills. “Second graders in the average SFA school who had started kindergarten in the bottom half of the sample in terms of their knowledge of the alphabet and their ability to sound out words registered significantly higher scores on measures of phonics skills, word recognition, and reading fluency than similar students in control group schools,” the authors note. This is an especially noteworthy finding because, as MDRC notes, students who begin school already behind are of special concern to policymakers and practitioners. Neither is SFA a budget buster: The report calculates direct expenditures for adopting SFA’s model at $119 more per student, per year in SFA schools than in control group schools. Not a bad bargain for either schools or the taxpayers who footed the bill for SFA’s i3 grant.
SOURCE: Janet Quint et al., “Scaling up the success for all model of school reform,” MDRC (September 2015).
