Eight broad findings are discussed here and in more detail in the Special Strategies Final Report (Stringfield et al., 1997).
Finding #1: Americas students who have been placed at risk of academic failure are capable of achieving at levels that meet and perhaps exceed current national averages. The ability of disadvantaged students to achieve academically was clearly demonstrated at some of the Special Strategies sites.
Recently, some have raised the troubling hypothesis that children of poverty do not merely not achieve, but that they are genetically incapable of achieving at high levels (Hernstein & Murray, 1994). Predating the current debates by 15 years, Ron Edmonds (1979) reasoned that to counter a genetic-limitation hypothesis, one would only have to identify one school in which large numbers of urban poor children were achieving at high levels.
Disadvantaged students in several Special Strategies schools began the study far below the national average, yet made academic gains toward or exceeding national means. In some schools the gains were dramatic. Figure 7 presents three-year data from initially low-achieving students in two Special Strategies schools, and contrasts those data with data from the Prospects (Puma et al., 1993) nationally-weighted findings.
The Special Strategies schools are Success for All-A (SFA-A) and Comer School Development Program-A (Comer SDP-A). Both schools served inner-city communities, both served 90+% minority student populations, and in both schools 70+% of the students received free lunches, indicating that both schools served communities that were economically very disadvantaged. SFA-A served a community that included a significant number of first-generation immigrants in whose homes the primary language was other than English.
Because Special Strategies was designed to focus on students who potentially could have received Chapter 1 services, Figure 7 presents data only on students whose CTBS Reading Comprehension scores in the fall of first grade were below the 50th percentile (e.g. students who would have been eligible for traditional Chapter 1 services). As a practical matter, this eliminated very few students from SFA-A or Comer SDP-A. Virtually all students in these two schools began first grade at well below the national average.
Figure 7 presents three years of data for four groups of students in a compact form, so a brief explanation may aid in interpretation.6 The figure presents data from four groups, including two study groups and two comparison groups:
Each group was tested four times: fall of first grade, and springs of
first, second, and third grades. The data are presented on the Normal Curve Equivalent
(NCE) scale.7
The first comparison group, initially low achieving first grade students in the nationally weighted sample, averaged a NCE score of 36.3 (26th percentile) in the fall of first grade and rose slightly over time to a mean score in the spring of third grade of 40 (32nd percentile). Mean test scores for the second comparison group, initially low achieving first grade students in high-poverty schools, rose only slightly over time, and remained substantially below the achievement of the first comparison group. Prospects data indicate that schools serving more disadvantaged students are, in general, having more difficulty helping low-achieving students catch up to national averages than are schools serving fewer disadvantaged students.
Given that both SFA-A and Comer SDP-A had high percentages of free-lunch students, the Prospects high poverty group was a reasonable control against which to measure progress in the two Special Strategies schools. Given that the line over the striped area represents a weighted estimation of the full national population of students who had pretests below the 50th percentile, it could be thought of as a more demanding standard. Crossing this higher line would mean that a Special Strategies school serving a very disadvantaged community had surpassed the national average progress made by all students with low pretests. Crossing the NCE=50 line on the figure would represent a higher standard yet. It would indicate that initially low-achieving students at a high-poverty Special Strategies school had not only outperformed students at demographically similar and at demographically more advantaged schools, but had achieved at levels equal to or exceeding the average achievement for all students in the CTBS norming sample, regardless of their pretests.
As demonstrated in Figure 7, progress made by students in the two Special Strategies schools was particularly encouraging. The initially low-achieving students in Comer SDP-A and SFAA began the study with reading comprehension levels below even the average for low-achieving students in high-poverty schools. Yet over their first three years in school, students in Comer SDP-A and SFA-A produced achievement scores that substantially exceeded both those of other students in high-poverty schools, and equaled or exceeded those of initially low-achieving students in typical schools. Initially low-achieving students at Comer SDP-A approached the national average score by the end of grade three (NCE=45.5, or the 42nd percentile on the CTBS Reading Comprehension subscale; N of students with test data at all data points=21). Initially low-achieving students at SFA-A surpassed the 50th percentile (NCE=53.4, or the 56th percentile on the CTBS; N=38).
Given that the predominantly poor, overwhelmingly minority, initially low-achieving students in these schools demonstrated reading comprehension levels near or above the national average by the end of grade three, there is good reason to believe that most children of poverty, when well educated, can achieve at similar levels. The current national average can be viewed as an achievable benchmark for schools serving Americas children of poverty, when programs that have proven to be effective are well implemented.
6 A full description of the
relevant Special Strategies and Prospects data sets can be found in the Special
Strategies Final Report, Chapters
Twelve through Fifteen, and Technical Appendix I and II.
7 An NCE is a normalized standard
score matching the percentile distribution at values of 1, 50, and 99 with a mean of 50
and a standard
deviation of 21.06 (Tallmadge & Wood, 1981). A student with an NCE
score below 50 on a particular test would have scored below the national
average on that test. A student with an NCE score of 1 would have scored
at the first percentile, with 99% of all students in the norming sample
having a higher score.
