A Cause for National Pause: Title I Schoolwide Projects.

Recent Title I regulations have allowed local school districts to use Title I funds to establish schoolwids projects to upgrade the educational program for the entire school, not just for targeted students. Austin used Title I and local funds to establish two schoolwide projects where pullout programs were ended and the pupil/teacher ratio was lowered to 15-to-1. Evaluation findings showed that: . The lower pupil/teacher ratio gave a meaningful boost to achievement in reading, language, and math. . The project teachers had very high morale. They felt more effective in their work. The lower pupil/teacher ratio may have had more impact on the quality of instruction (less off-task time, better teacher monitoring of work, earlier corrective feedback, fewer adults with instructional responsibility for the child, fewer disruptions, etc.) than on its quantity. The program is expensive. Adequate classroom space can be a problem. Implications of the findings for planning Title I Programs are briefly discussed. A Cause for National Pau : Title I Schoolwide Proj ts David Doss Freda Holl Austin Independent Spool District "Pull out programs are not ef ective. " When Austin evaluators kept repeating this research dictum td conscientious program planners in the Austin Independent School District, there was considerable dismay among program planners. AISD evaluators had previously shown that teacher aides were similarly ineffective. This doesn't leave many program alternatives. The District tried to move to.ard a "floating teacher" approach to delivering services that would not supplant; that is, a Title I teacher went into a regular classroom and worked with a group of Title I students for a part of a day. Team approaches in a "language arts' block" period were also tried. Neither of these were appealing to school staff, however, and typically a school that began with a "floating teacher" would backslide before the year advanced very much. Sharing a classroom is simply uncomfortable for molt teachers. Team teaching is also an unpopular elementary achema. The provision for schoolwide projects appeared in the 1978 Education Amendments Act at just the right time. The available options seemed to have been exhausted and this presented a new hope. At about the same time, the Gene Glass meta-analysis of the effects of class si'e appeared. It offered new hope that class size reductions might be beneficial especially if the ratio could be held to 15-to-1 or less. The District had had a locally funded special project for some years in which an overall reduction of class size to 22-to-1 pupil/teacher ratio in the majority of Title I schools demonstrated a slight positive relationship to achievement. AISD classroom observations also indicated that compensatory programs during the regular day inevitably supplanted regular instruction (Ligon and Doss, 1982). Other research in the District seemed to suggest that a possible reason for the ineffectiveness of pullout programs was the regular classroom teacher's decreased sense of responsibility for the special program student. The "schoolwide projects" provision meant that schools with greater than 75% low-income populations could serve the entire school population provided the district match from local funds. the Title I per-pupil expenditures for each non-Title I student. This provision, added to the enabling legislation by Congress because of concern expressed by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, was one reason that only 19 of 600 eligible districts implemented echoolwide projects during the first possible year for implementation (Rubin and David 1981). In Austin, it took considerable planning and persuasion to bring about the eventual investment of approximately $180,000 per year of local funds for the project in the two district schools meeting the 75% eligibility requirement. Austin ISD had only these two schools eligible following the implementation of a districtwide desegregation order at the elementary level during the 1980-81 school year. The available research was used to argue persuasively for a three year trial project. Schoolwide projects finally received the necessary district funding in May of 1980. 1 4