Prepackaged School Reform - school use of standardized curricular programmes

School Administrator, Jan, 2000 by Jay Mathews

Do highly scripted curricular programs, such as Success for All, stymie teacher initiative and poison morale?

At the Edison-Friendship Public Charter School in southeast Washington, D.C., 2nd-grade teacher Katrinka Agurs had a kitchen timer in her hand to make certain her students were keeping up the pace.

"You need to get started," she told one child dawdling on a writing exercise. "Time is running out." A few minutes later she said, "You have four seconds."

Much of the time in her 90-minute morning class was spent reading aloud in unison to reinforce the sound of words. "Point, ready, read!" she said. All 14 children began to read a story out loud. Then they paired up for quick critiques of each other's reading, while Agurs kept one eye on the clock.

This was teaching by the book--a heavily scripted method called Success for All--and it was working. Reading scores were up significantly at Edison-Friendship by the end of the year.

However, as such methods spread, educators are disagreeing over whether forcing teachers to follow such a tightly written schedule is a proper use of their talents. Success for All and another scripted method called Direct Instruction have received accolades from educators and a remarkable endorsement from five leading educational organizations. But that has not stopped critics from complaining about their effect on teacher morale and initiative.

Divergent Views

In the October 1999 issue of Phi Delta Kappan, University of Chicago researchers Herbert J. Walberg and Rebecca C. Greenberg said Success for All was one of several programs that have secured federal funds on the strength of self-serving research done by the program developers or close colleagues. It cited independent research that had been critical of Success for All results in Baltimore and suggested the program's positive results might be the result of biased testing, unusually committed teachers or a narrow focus on reading.

The Success for All approach "really dishonors the professional craft of the teacher," says Linda M. McNeil, co-director of the Rice University Center for Education in Houston, where many schools are using the program. Educators, she adds, "do not find in this program, or any other package, the depth and breadth and the variety of reading styles they need to get all their kids to read and to find reading purposeful and fun."

James C. Enochs, superintendent of the 32,000-student Modesto, Calif., city schools, has a different view.

"We have a lot of young, inexperienced teachers," he says. "They obviously need a highly prescriptive way of teaching because there has been a major failure in teaching reading instruction at our state colleges and universities." He says his district has had good results under both Direct Instruction and Success for All.

Although, he acknowledges, not all schools in his district have improved under the programs, one early three-year study showed better reading scores and better writing directly attributable to Success for All. Several dozen elementary schools run by the for-profit educational company Edison Schools Inc. use Success for All, and most have reported achievement gains.

Success for All was invented by a husband-and-wife team of Baltimore-based psychologists, Robert E. Slavin and Nancy A. Madden. Slavin, co-director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk, said when teachers complain that Success for All stifles their creativity, there are two possible interpretations: "One, that they really do have terrific ideas and really could do it better than our program," he says, "or two, 'I'm lazy, I'm afraid, I've always done things this way.'"

Slavin and Madden met at Reed College, a small school in Oregon catering to independent thinkers. They shared their ideas about how to change society through better schools.

Today the program they began to conceive as idealistic teen-agers has spread to 1,500 schools. It has grown into a $45 million-a-year non-profit business with 265 employees.

Direct Instruction, which like Success for All gives teachers specific instructions, is being used in 150 schools and several thousand other individual classrooms. It was developed by Siegfried Engelmann at the University of Illinois in the late 1960s and then at the University of Oregon. The curriculum materials are published by Science Research Associates, a division of McGraw-Hill. The initial focus on reading and mathematics has expanded to lesson plans in science, social science and handwriting. Like Success for All, the program has been particularly successful in low-performing schools in high-poverty areas.

A Seal of Approval

The distaste that many professional educators feel for Success For All and Direct Instruction might be an insurmountable handicap if this were not an age in which schools are forced to focus on academic results. Both programs have research studies showing their benefits and each just acquired the educational equivalent of a Most Valuable Player award.