Success for All Does Not Produce Success for Students

Mr. Pogrow maintains that, despite the mountains ofdata presented by Mr. Slavin and Ms. Madden, his questions about the results of Success for All remain unanswered. THE ISSUE of whether the use of Success for All (SFA) is supported by valid research is probably the most important and relevant research discussion for practitioners in recent years. The belief in the unique success of SFA has caused Congress to reshape Title I policy in favor of comprehensive schoolwide reform models and approaches, has caused states and courts to mandate such programs, and has caused New Jersey to try to mandate the use of SFA in all high-poverty schools in the state. As SFA and its approach are increasingly favored, the choices that schools and teachers are allowed to consider to serve educationally disadvantaged students are increasingly restricted. The belief in the validity of this program has also concentrated funding from the U.S. Department of Education (ED) in the hands of a few large organizations that are deemed to be using the right approach. Thus new knowledge and program innovations are also restricted. In other words, the belief that the issue of how best to help students has been settled by the "unassailable" data provided by Robert Slavin, Nancy Madden, and their associates - both in the Kappan and elsewhere - makes it inappropriate even to consider alternatives. Until I and others started to question the data and methodology used to support SFA, criticism was limited to concerns that the program was overstructured and regimented to such an extent that it limited the professional discretion of teachers. Nevertheless, I agree with Slavin and Madden, co-developers of SFA and of Roots & Wings, that, if their data truly show that their approach is overwhelmingly producing success for students, then it is my professional obligation to support its use, regardless of my own philosophical bias. But suppose the data and conclusions are not valid and that there is no valid evidence of student success. Then we will have lost 10 years of knowledge generation and opportunities for improvement, and we will have imposed an ineffective approach and adopted misguided policies. Even worse, we as a profession are then guilty of mistakenly pushing a mind-numbing form of learning onto large numbers of low-income students. The perceived success of SFA gave the program extraordinary influence both on its own and as part of the New American Schools (NAS), an organization that promotes the use of SFA, Roots & Wings, and other schoolwide reform models. Everyone agrees that overall school improvement is and always has been the desired goal. The question is how to achieve this end in ways that also improve the performance of educationally disadvantaged students and thereby reduce learning gaps. The perceived success of SFA led Congress to favor the use of "validated" schoolwide models, rather than the targeting of services to Title I students. The expectation is that improving a school's overall performance will increase the achievement of Title I students more greatly than will providing them with special help. Slavin's writings and the work of the research center he heads have played key roles in identifying and promoting the use of validated whole-school reform models. However, if the research supporting SFA is not valid and if the program does not work, then we have been using the wrong approach to helping disadvantaged students, and they may be falling through the cracks. Indeed, the $8 billion this nation spends each year to help Title I students may be helping the more advantaged students to reap even greater benefits - thereby increasing the learning gaps the funds were designed to reduce. This article will focus on answering some central questions about SFA's success. Do the data say that SFA has been a success for students, teachers, and the profession? Are the results of research on SFA based on a scientifically unbiased process, or do they merely represent "vendor spin" on the data? …