Introduction

Are there specific programs or restructuring designs that schools can use to enhance the learning of students placed at risk of academic failure? If so, what are their key characteristics and what local conditions and steps are required to replicate those promising programs?

Such questions are highly relevant to local educators who are struggling every day to provide the best possible education to their students. Similarly, the questions are important to the United States Department of Education (USED), which for the past 30 years has been charged with guiding federal compensatory education programs. Therefore, in the fall of 1990 the USED awarded two contracts to examine promising services funded under Chapter 1.¹ Data gathering began that same year, and both studies were conducted by staff from Johns Hopkins University and its subcontractor, Abt Associates Inc.

This executive summary provides an overview of the design and findings from the Urban and Suburban/Rural Special Strategies for Educating Disadvantaged Students Studies. The executive summary proceeds from this introduction through overviews of the studies purposes, methods, findings, and implications, a summary, and appendices. The first section provides program-by-program overviews. More detailed descriptions of the studies designs, implementations, and findings are available in the First Year (Stringfield et al., 1994), Second Year (Stringfield et al., 1997), and Final Report (Stringfield et al., 1997). The eight major findings of the study are as follows:

1. America's students who have been placed at risk of academic failure are capable of achieving at levels that meet national averages. The ability of disadvantaged students to achieve academically was clearly demonstrated at some of the Special Strategies sites.
2. Each of the programs studied in Special Strategies offered clear strengths, yet even when visiting sites that were nominated as exemplars, we often found great variance in both implementation levels and effects.
3. The Special Strategies schools obtaining the greatest academic gains for their at-risk students paid a great deal of attention to issues of initial and long-term implementation, and to institutionalizing the reforms. Several general and a great many program-specific implementation issues, if not successfully addressed, permanently crippled otherwise promising programs.
4. Promising programs that concentrated their efforts in the early grades tended to obtain larger achievement gains from students placed at risk than did programs spreading resources more evenly over the elementary grades or in secondary schools. Within the schools observed during first through third grades, students in schools using externally developed designs tended to achieve greater academic gains than did students in locally developed programs. Students in schools working with whole school reform tended to achieve greater gains than did students in schools attempting various pull-out programs. None of the secondary schools in the Special Strategies Studies achieved stable implementation across the full school, and, perhaps as a result, none produced a pattern of achievement gains.
5. A series of findings regarding classroom activities across virtually all of the programs was, in one sense, distressing. Extensive observations of class periods and students whole school days provided a picture of instruction driven by management issues, of very uneven access to subjects beyond reading/language arts and mathematics, and of reforms often stifled by seemingly straightforward issues such as scheduling. A more optimistic view of this finding is that there remains ample room for instructional improvements, even in schools nominated as providing exemplary services.
6. The challenges faced by Special Strategies schools attempting to educate large numbers of students at risk were often enormous, and resources with which to address those challenges were often in short supply.
7. Schools used federal compensatory education funds to create or adopt, and then sustain, new programs they often could not have considered otherwise. In the hands of instructionally focused, creative educational administrators and teachers, Chapter 1 became the primary engine for reform in otherwise distressed schools.
8. Most of the programs studied in Special Strategies are continuing to evolve and expand. These systematic self-improvements bode well for the future of school reform.

         1 The federal compensatory education program known as Title I was initially funded in 1965, renamed Chapter 1 in the 1980s, and returned by Congress to the name Title I in 1994. Because this study was conducted during years when the program was funded under Chapter 1, the program will be referred to by that name in this executive summary.