Robert E. Slavin
Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk
Johns Hopkins University
September 1995
This paper
was written under funding from the Office of Educational Research
and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education (Grant No. R117D-40005).
However, any opinions expressed are those of the author and do not
necessarily represent OERI positions or policies.
Once
upon a time, there was a town that had in it a playground
located at the edge of the cliff. Every so often a child would
fall off of the cliff and would be seriously injured. At last
the town council decided that something should be done. After
much discussion, however, the council was deadlocked. Some
council members wanted to put a fence at the top of the cliff,
but others wanted to put an ambulance at the bottom. |
In the parable of the fence and the ambulance,
it is clear that the idea of putting an ambulance at the bottom of
the cliff is foolish on many levels. Waiting for children to be injured
and only then providing them with help would be cruel and inhuman
if the damage could have been prevented. Further, it is needlessly
expensive; an ambulance costs far more than a fence.
Yet long-standing policies in special education,
especially for children with learning disabilities, are very much
like putting an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. Schools generally
provide pretty good programs in kindergarten, first grade, and beyond,
but they know with certainty that a number of children will fall by
the wayside. In particular, a certain number of children who are of
normal intelligence will fail to learn to read. After a while, these
children are very likely to be retained, assigned to long-term remedial
services, or labeled as having specific learning disabilities and
provided with special education services. By the time these services
are provided, most children have already learned that they have failed
at their most important task, learning to read. By then they are likely
to have lost much of the motivation, enthusiasm, and positive expectations
with which they entered school. Schools will be paying for years (in
special education and remedial instruction costs) for failing to ensure
that students were successful in the early grades.
Neverstreaming:
Does it work?
Today, most children with learning disabilities are mainstreamed for
much of their school day. This is better than self-contained placement,
but is still far less than ideal. Mainstreamed students with academic
deficiencies are often poorly accepted by their peers, struggle with
academic content, and develop low self-esteem (Bear, Clever, &
Proctor, 1991).
Obviously, students fare better when they succeed
the first time they are taught, thereby avoiding both special education
and mainstreaming. We call this neverstreaming (Slavin et al., 1991):
prevention and early intervention programs powerful enough to ensure
that virtually every child is successful in the first place, and therefore
never needs special or remedial services.
Is Neverstreaming
Possible?
No one would deny that in concept, it would be better to ensure the
success of all children in the early grades than to provide them with
long-term special or remedial education after they have failed. The
question is whether this is possible as a practical reality in real
schools.
There is evidence accumulating from several directions
to indicate that, at least in the area of reading, it is in fact possible
to ensure the success of almost all children in the early elementary
grades, and that this has profound implications for special education
for reading disabilities.
Exhibit I: Success
for All
Perhaps the strongest evidence for the feasibility of neverstreaming
comes from research on our own Success for All program (Slavin et
al., 1996). Success for All is a comprehensive approach to restructuring
elementary schools. The focus of the program is on prevention and
early, intensive intervention. The preventive aspects of the program
focus on providing research-based instructional programs to children
in preschool, kindergarten, and grades 1-6 reading, writing, and language
arts, backed up by intensive professional development, a full-time
building facilitator to help all teachers constantly improve their
instructional strategies, a curriculum-based assessment program to
monitor student success and identify children in need of additional
help, and an extensive program of parent involvement. The instructional
programs make extensive use of cooperative learning and maintain a
balance between phonics, children's literature, creative writing,
and home reading.
Even the best instructional programs cannot ensure
success for every child. For this reason, Success for All schools
also provide one-to-one tutoring to individual children who are struggling
in reading. Tutoring services, typically provided by certified teachers,
focus on first graders. The idea is to see that children are successful
the first time and never become remedial readers. The tutoring model
emphasizes teaching children metacognitive skills, such as asking
themselves whether what they read makes sense, and is closely integrated
with classroom instruction. Another aspect of early, intensive intervention
is provided by a family support team located in each school. In addition
to building parent involvement and giving parents strategies for helping
their own children, this team develops programs to improve attendance,
resolve behavior problems, and integrate with local agencies to see
that children have eyeglasses, hearing aids, health services, or other
needed assistance.
Research on Success for All (Slavin et al., 1992,
1994, 1996; Madden et al., 1993) has shown consistent positive effects
of the program on student reading achievement as measured by individually
administered reading tests as well as standardized measures. Success
for All students in nine school districts throughout the U.S. have
averaged three months ahead of matched control students by the end
of first grade and more than a year ahead by the end of fifth grade.
The effects are particularly large for the students who are most at
risk, those in the lowest quarter of their grades.
The research on Success for All has direct relevance
to special education. A longitudinal study in very high-poverty Baltimore
schools found that only 2.2% of third graders (including those in
special education) were performing two years below grade level, a
usual criterion for identification of reading disabilities. In the
control groups, 8.8% of third graders were performing this poorly
(Slavin et al., 1992). Actual special education placements were cut
in half. Another study in Ft. Wayne, Indiana by Smith, Ross, &
Casey (1994) found that special education referrals in grades K-3
were more than three times higher in control schools than in Success
for All schools. Across four districts, Smith et al. also found substantially
higher first grade achievement among special education students in
Success for All than in control schools.
Success for All is currently being implemented
in more than 300 schools in 70 districts in 24 states. It is usually
funded by reallocation of Title I funds, supplemented on occasion
by special education funds or personnel. Very few schools have funding
beyond what they would have had without the program. What this means
is that even without extra resources, reading failure can be substantially
reduced. With additional resources to pay for more tutors, the number
of children failing to meet adequate standards in reading can be reduced
even further (see Slavin et al., 1992).
Exhibit 2: Reading
Recovery
Reading Recovery is a first-grade tutoring program originally developed
in New Zealand by Marie Clay (1985) and researched and disseminatied
in the U. S. by Gay Su Pinnell and her colleagues at Ohio State University
(Pinnell, DeFord, & Lyons, 1988). Reading Recovery provides 30
minutes of daily, one-to-one tutoring to first graders who score poorly
on a diagnostic battery. Tutors are certified teachers who complete
an extensive program of professional development. As in the case of
Success for All, research on Reading Recovery shows that the vast
majority of children can be well on the way to success in reading
by the end of first grade (Pinnell et. al. 1994). Further, Reading
Recovery students are more likely than matched comparison students
to stay out of special education (Lyons, 1989). Reading Recovery is
in use in thousands of U.S. schools.
Exhibit 3: Prevention
of Learning Disabilities
The purpose of Prevention of Learning Disabilities is implied in its
name: to keep children from ever needing special education services
for learning disabilities (Silver & Hagin, 1990). Like Reading
Recovery, Prevention of Learning Disabilities provides one-to-one
tutoring to at-risk first graders. However, the tutoring focuses on
general perceptual skills as well as reading. Studies of Prevention
of Learning Disabilities have found strong positive effects of the
program on reading outcomes (Silver & Hagin, 1990).
Exhibit 4: Early
Childhood Interventions
Reading Recovery and Prevention of Learning Disabilities start with
children in first grade, and Success for All starts with four and
five year olds. Yet much of students' cognitive development has already
taken place by age four (Carnegie Corporation, 1994). There is evidence
that if children growing up in impoverished families are given effective
stimulation programs and their parents are given help in creating
a healthy home environment, they are more likely to perform well in
school and to stay out of special education. The best example of this
is the Carolina Abecedarian Project (Campbell and Ramey, 1994), which
found strong and lasting effects of an intensive early intervention
program that followed children and their parents through the critical
first five years of life.
Exhibit 5: Family
Support and Integrated Services
Some children fail in the early grades for reasons that have nothing
to do with their cognitive capabilities. Conflicts between parents
and schools in values and expectations can undermine school success.
Also, there are children who do not attend school regularly or need
eyeglasses or hearing aids or lack adequate nutrition. Family support
and integrated service programs can solve many of these problems.
Two national programs based largely on improving school-home collaboration
and services for children are Comer's (1988) School Development Program
and Zigler's Schools of the 21st Century (Zigler, Finn-Stevenson,
& Linkins, 1992).
A World Without
Learning Disabilities?
At present, no one program has been able to ensure that 100% of children
are reading well enough to stay out of special education. However,
the programs described here have come close, and with additional research
and experience are sure to learn how to come ever closer. Further,
imagine that children could receive early childhood interventions
as effective as those provided by the Abecedarian Project, one-to-one
tutoring as effective as Reading Recovery or Prevention of Learning
Disabilities, family support programs as effective as those in the
Comer and Zigler models, and reading programs and overall school reorganization
as effective as those used in Success for All. Such an approach would
be certain to reduce the number of children still having reading problems
to a tiny fraction of the numbers we have today.
There is a useful and appropriate debate about
special education versus inclusion for children with more serious,
low-incidence disabilities. However, for children at risk of learning
disabilities, neither special education nor inclusion are the answer.
Instead, we need to focus on effective prevention and early intervention.
If we know how to ensure that virtually every child will become a
skillful, strategic, and enthusiastic reader, then it is criminal
to let children fall behind and only then provide assistance. Nevestreaming,
not mainstreaming or special education, should be the goal for all
children who are at risk.
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