Prepackaged School Reform - school use of standardized curricular programmes

School Administrator, Jan, 2000 by Jay Mathews

Formula for Success

Success for All was conceived in 1986 when Kalman "Buzzy" Hettleman, a former Maryland state secretary of human resources, asked Slavin, Madden and other Johns Hopkins researchers what they would do if they had the freedom to use all they had learned to remake an inner-city school. They hashed out a few ideas and then discovered to their astonishment that Hettleman was not just philosophizing. He arranged for them to set up their program at Abbottston Elementary School in Baltimore. In September 1987, Success for All was born.

Slavin, Madden and the rest of the team wanted to instill reading skills early in each child's school life without forcing teachers beyond their capabilities or spending too much money. It was assembly-line school reform, with scripted lessons, cheaply printed black-and-white reading materials and strict rules for 90 minutes of lessons each day supplemented by 20-minute daily tutoring sessions for students who needed extra help.

Specialist instructors at the school who did not usually have their own classrooms, like art and physical education teachers, also taught the 90-minute reading groups, organized by level of achievement, so that the average class size could be kept at about 15 students. Every eight weeks students were tested and moved to higher or lower groups as needed. Family support teams addressed problems at home. Success for All almost died at age three when the Baltimore superintendent who had supported the program was forced out of office. But by then the Slavin-Madden team could show their children were moving ahead of those in schools without the program-by as much as a full grade in some cases. Fewer students were being held back and fewer were being sent to special education classes.

Schoolwide Endorsement

Education reform today resembles the early automobile industry. Dozens of models have been developed in various parts of the country, each with its own approach and circle of devotees. But developers of both Success for All and Direct Instruction say that a school, unlike a car, will not run if the operators don't like the vehicle.

Direct Instruction recommends that teachers vote to adopt the program and remove any programs that conflict with it. Success for All has gone one step further and requires a vote. At least 80 percent of a school's professional staff must approve Success for All in a secret ballot before it may be implemented.

That remarkable facet of the program has set the stage for dramatic, and by all appearances, instructive debates in hundreds of schools over the nature of change in education. Only about 10 percent of schools that voted on Success for All have turned it down, Madden says. But she also estimated that the number of schools that dropped the idea before voting on the program was likely larger than the number that eventually accepted it.

Last year at Mount Vernon Elementary School in Alexandria, Va., Principal Gayle Smith tried to start a Success for All program. To her, it appeared to be the most effective program ever devised to turn disadvantaged children into good readers. Her school, full of children from families that did not speak English at home, had the lowest reading scores in the city school district of 11,000 students. She thought a proven national model would help, but she was not certain her staff would let her use it.