Cecelia Daniels
Nancy A. Madden
Success for All Foundation
Robert E. Slavin
Johns Hopkins University
Revised, January, 2005
This research was funded primarily by the
Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education (No. ED-99-CO-0153).
However, any opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not
necessarily represent IES positions or policies.
Sixteen years ago, the Carnegie Corporation (1989) issued a report that
profoundly affected the education of young adolescents. Turning Points
critiqued the rigid traditional structure of middle schools and advocated
reforms intended to make middle grades education more personalized,
supportive, and active: interdisciplinary teams, cooperative learning,
involvement with families and community, mentoring, and active teaching.
Today, the middle school movement
is itself at a turning point. The Turning Points reforms, where they
have been implemented, have created more humane, child-focused environments
that are more in tune with the developmental needs of young adolescents.
Yet the achievement of children in the middle grades, especially in
high-poverty communities, has continued to languish.
As recognized by one of the intellectual leaders of Turning Points,
Tony Jackson (Jackson & Davis, 2000), what Turning Points and other
middle grades reforms of the 1980’s and ‘90’s left
out was curriculum and instruction. Except for general suggestions about
the benefits of active, hands-on, cooperative learning and teaching,
teachers have had few practical tools to translate the good ideas of
the middle school movement into day-to-day teaching. In the current
environment increasing accountability pressures brought on in part by
No Child Left Behind, it is simply not enough to engage and support
young adolescents. They also need to learn more. Reform in the middle
grades needs to incorporate the advances advocated by Turning Points,
but also to develop well-designed, replicable models that provide challenging
content, research-based instructional strategies, and extensive professional
development for teachers to enable these students to make progress on
the standards that all states are mandating.
The
Success for All Middle School
The Success for All Middle School was designed to help middle grades
educators implement the most important elements of Turning Points and
to add well-structured curricula, instructional methods, and professional
development for teachers to help students reach their full potential.
The program is based on the Success for All elementary design, the most
widely used and extensively evaluated of all comprehensive school reform
models (Borman et al., 2003; Herman, 1999; Slavin & Madden, 2001).
However, the elementary model was totally redesigned to meet the very
different developmental needs of young adolescents and the institutional
realities of middle grades education. It provides teachers with specific,
well-structured student materials, manuals, and other supports, as well
as extensive professional development, follow-up, and opportunities
for continuing growth.
School
and Classroom Organization
Interdisciplinary teams. Like many other middle school reform models,
students in Success for All middle schools are grouped in interdisciplinary
“teams,” each of which has one teacher of each subject.
The purpose of these teams is to provide students with a smaller core
group of peers and caring adults to attend to their academic and social
needs.
Facilitator. Each
Success for All Middle School has a full-time facilitator who helps
all teachers implement the program, visits classes, organizes data for
grouping, and maintains coordination among all staff.
Grouping for Reading. Ensuring literacy for all students is a primary
goal of the Success for All Middle School. Students in each grade, 6-8,
are assigned to a reading class according to their level of reading
skill. A common time period is set aside for this purpose, and all teachers,
including art, music, physical education, and other special subject
teachers, teach a reading class. Because of this common reading period,
students who make rapid progress can be easily moved at any time to
higher-performing reading classes without upsetting their entire class
schedules. Further, teaching reading gives all teachers strategies in
their subject-matter teaching that continuously reinforce literacy skills.
Cooperative Learning.
Cooperative learning is extensively used in all subjects in Success
for All Middle Schools. Research on cooperative learning has long established
that students who work in small, well-structured learning teams gain
academically if there are clear group goals and if group success depends
on the individual learning of all group members (see Slavin, 1995; Slavin,
Hurley, & Chamberlain, 2003). A cooperative group typically involves
four students who are diverse in skills, gender, and ethnicity. Students
work together on projects and academic work and help each other learn
content, but ultimately each student must show individual mastery of
the content. Use of cooperative teams also contributes to outcomes such
as improved social acceptance, intergroup relations, and self-esteem,
all of which are of particular importance for young adolescents (Slavin,
1995).
Curriculum
Components
The Reading Edge. The most important curriculum focus of the Success
for All Middle School is reading. Reading performance in high-poverty
middle schools is unacceptably low (see Donahue et al., 1999; Cooney,
1998), and this deficit holds back progress in all subject areas (Jackson
& Davis, 2000).
As students beginning middle school face more challenging content in
various subject areas, advanced reading skills and strategies become
essential. The Reading Edge program meets this need with an accelerated
60-minute block every day, providing students at all reading levels
with structured lessons. Phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and basic and
advanced comprehension strategies form the program’s foundation.
Students learn to understand expository as well as narrative texts and
to build the study strategies for success in high school. In addition,
Reading Edge lessons make extensive use of cooperative learning, harnessing
the strength of peer relationships in young adolescents and giving students
powerful incentives to read and to help their teammates read. These
reading and cooperative learning techniques are reinforced throughout
the day in the other components of the SFA Middle School.
Assessment, Grouping, and Regrouping. At the beginning of the school
year, a standardized assessment provides baseline data on each student’s
reading level (from pre-primer to eighth grade). The SFA facilitator
compiles this data to help him or her place students in instructionally
appropriate reading levels. As noted earlier, all faculty members teach
reading to maximize the number of classes and reduce class size. Having
homogeneous classes limits the range of performance levels and allows
teachers to customize instruction for individual learning styles. Every
eight weeks, students are reassessed and regrouped according to the
progress they have made. In this way, students have the opportunity
to move more than one reading level each year until they are proficient,
on-grade-level readers.
Humanities. The
SFA Middle School humanities curriculum challenges students to make
practical use of reading, writing, and analytical skills. These standards-based
units are taught daily, usually in a double period, and include both
social studies and language arts curricula. In social studies units,
students investigate important themes and topics, connecting what they
learn about the past with their own lives, and present their findings
in various forms of writing. In language arts units students explore
different genres of literature, write original pieces following conventions
of writing, and learn and practice basic grammar skills.
Each grade level begins with one or
more foundation units that familiarize teachers and students with cooperative
learning techniques and focus on concrete skills that students apply
throughout the year. For example, in a foundation unit on the conventions
of writing, students learn the steps of the writing process and peer
review as they practice working as members of a cooperative learning
team. Students then refine their use of the writing process in every
unit that follows.
The remaining units engage students
with a problem to solve or a task to complete related to a particular
theme or topic. For example, a unit on Ancient Egypt challenges students
to solve the mystery of a tomb robbery. To do so, they take on the roles
of possible suspects from the ranks of Egyptian society. As students
learn about life in ancient Egypt, they make decisions about the robbery
based on their findings. Such materials engage students’ curiosity,
emotions, and intellects, enhancing their motivations to learn the content.
Science. Many Success
for All Middle Schools use the specially developed science program a
year or two after they begin the reading program. In it, students construct
knowledge on the basis of direct experience through exploration, teacher
demonstration and explanation, and direct instruction and experimentation.
All units are based on National Science Education Standards.
Each grade level begins with one or more foundation units that focus
on a specific set of skills. For instance, a unit on science safety
teaches students not only how to work safely in a science lab, but also
how to respond to the classroom management strategies used in SFA classes.
The remaining units present students with a scenario or problem. For
example, in Earthquake!, about a fictitious town situated on a fault,
students compile recommendations concerning land use, earthquake-resistant
building designs, and other issues impacted by seismic activity. In
the context of this work, students learn about using models to study
earth science concepts such as plate tectonics, as well as physical
science concepts such as wave structure and energy. Students also learn
to read maps, informational text, organize data into charts and graphs,
draw conclusions, and write their findings in a number of different
formats.
School
and Family Success
School and Family Success teams within each school focus on issues such
as attendance, school-based intervention for struggling students, family
involvement, service integration with community agencies, and building
students’ social problem-solving skills.
Evaluation
The Success for All Middle School is being evaluated by a third party
evaluator, the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University
of Chicago, which is collecting student-level data from state assessments.
However, reading results at the school level from 2001 to 2004 were
obtained from state web sites. School-level results compare achievement
gains on state high-stakes reading measures in SFA middle schools to
those in matched comparison schools.
In all seven school pairs, students
in the SFA Middle Schools gained substantially more on their state reading
assessments than did students in comparison schools. In many cases,
these differences were striking. At Tahola School, a K-12 school primarily
serving Native American students in rural Washington State, the Success
for All seventh graders gained 95.5 percentage points in students meeting
standards on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL), going
from 4.5% to 100% passing. The comparison school gained only 18.4 percentage
points, while the state average gained only 20.7 percentage points.
Similarly, seventh graders at Richards Middle School in rural Missouri
gained 31.5 percentage points in students passing the Missouri Assessment
Program (MAP) Reading Scale, while a matched control school gained 10.3
points and the state gained only 2.4 points. Two inner-city middle schools
in Indianapolis gained markedly more than their comparison schools.
Coleman Middle school gained 9.0 percentage points on the Indiana Statewide
Testing for Educational Progress (ISTEP), averaging grades 6 and 8.
A control school gained only 0.5 points. Longfellow Middle School gained
15.5 percentage points on ISTEP, while its control school gained 4.0
points. Indiana middle grades as a whole gained 7.0 percentage points.
Carver Middle School in Meridian, Mississippi gained 5.8 percentage
points in students passing the Mississippi Curriculum Test (MCT), while
its control school gained by 2.3 points. SFA middle schools in Arizona
and Louisiana gained on their state assessments while both their control
schools and their states lost ground.
Recognizing the problems inherent
in averaging across different state measures, it is still interesting
to note that across the seven SFA schools, students gained an average
of 24.6 percentage points on state reading tests, while matched control
schools gained only 2.2 points and the gain of in each of the schools’
respective states was 4.2 percentage points.
Table 1 summarizes the gains in each SFA school, its matched control,
and its state.
Table
1
Gains in Percent of Students Passing State Reading Tests
in Success for All and Control Middle Schools,
2001 to 2004
Gains in Percent Passing
| |
|
|
| School (State) |
Measure |
Grades Tested |
SFA |
Control |
State |
| Washington |
WASL |
7 |
+95.5 |
+18.4 |
+20.7 |
| Missouri |
MAP |
7 |
+31.5 |
+10.3 |
+2.4 |
| Indiana-pair 1 |
ISTEP |
6, 8 |
+9.0 |
+0.5 |
+7.0 |
| Indiana- pair 2 |
ISTEP |
6, 8 |
+15.5 |
+4.0 |
+7.0 |
| Mississippi |
MCT |
6, 7 |
+5.8 |
+2.3 |
+8.1 |
| Arizona |
AIMS |
8 |
+3.0 |
-12.0 |
-6.0 |
| Louisiana |
LEAP |
8 |
+12.0 |
-8.0 |
-5.0 |
| Means* |
|
|
+24.6 |
+2.2 |
+4.2 |
|
*Means across different state assessments should be interpreted cautiously.
Conclusion
The Success for All Middle School design is a comprehensive, replicable
model for middle schools serving many at-risk young adolescents. Not
only does it incorporate the structural features emphasized in Turning
Points, but it also goes beyond this to provide specific content, instructional
strategies, and professional development to help all teachers implement
state-of-the-art instruction in their classes. Third-year evaluation
data show that this approach is having a substantial impact on students’
reading achievement in all of its pilot schools. As the Success for
All Middle School and other content-focused middle school reforms begin
to work at a larger scale and continue to produce convincing data, we
may finally achieve the breakthrough that Turning Points promised sixteen
years ago: reliable, replicable models to help schools ensure the success
of young adolescents.
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