There’s a name for the program at the heart of Steubenville’s remarkable reading results. It’s called Success for All. It’s been around for decades, and numerous studies have shown it’s effective. But relatively few school districts use it. We trace the history of the program and why it’s never really caught on. Read: Transcript of this episodeVideo: The Story Behind Sold a StoryDonate: Support our journalismMore: soldastory.orgEmail us: [email protected] Dive deeper into Sold a Story with a multi-part email series from host Emily Hanford. We’ll also keep you up to date on new episodes. Sign up at soldastory.org/extracredit.
Chapter 1: What is Success for All and who developed it?
Our first date was to go on a walk to sort of talk about how do we improve education?
What can we do? Nancy had tutored kids at poor schools in Minneapolis when she was in high school. And Bob had worked with kids in Washington, D.C.,
There was an orphanage that he was a bus driver for when he was 16 years old. And, you know, we both as high school kids knew that there was just so much inequality of opportunity for kids that didn't need to be.
They wanted to do something about it. They wanted to make poor schools better. But there was doubt at the time about whether improving schools could help poor children, about whether the quality of a school really mattered. Because of a big report that had been released a few years earlier, a report that had shaken the field of education.
In the 1960s, the federal government commissioned a sociologist named James Coleman to do a big study of educational opportunity in America. He gathered all kinds of information from thousands of schools, data on academic achievement, student demographics, teacher training, curriculum. It was one of the largest educational studies ever at the time.
Und was Coleman fand, war, dass die akademischen Erfolge einer Studentin viel auf ihren Familiensozioökonomischen Status hielten. In der Tat, die Familie, in der ein Kind geboren wurde, sah mehr an, als an die Schule, in die ein Kind gegangen ist. Dies unterkotzt den Argument, dass die Verbesserung der Schulen die Ergebnisse für Kinder verbessern könnte.
Aber Nancy und Bob, und auch andere Menschen, waren überzeugt, dass es mehr zu der Geschichte gab, Because if you dug into the details of Coleman's report, what you could see in the data was that some schools were having more of an impact than others. Some schools were making a difference for kids. And Bob and Nancy wanted to figure out, what were those schools doing? What made them effective?
I'm Emily Hanford and this is Sold a Story, a podcast from APM Reports. In diesem Video erzähle ich Ihnen die Geschichte eines Programms, das Bob Slaven und Nancy Madden erschaffen haben. Ein Programm, das zeigt, dass Schulen eine Unterschiede machen können. Es ist das Programm, das Steubenville 25 Jahre hervorragend benutzt hat.
Ein Programm, das seit langer Zeit studiert wurde und von substanziellen Beweisen unterstützt wird. Im Grunde genommen ist es ein Art Poster-Kind für ein Beweis-basiertes Programm. Aber was bedeutet es, für etwas Beweis-basiertes zu sein? It's a critical question right now, because states are making lists. Lists of approved programs. Programs, they say, are backed by the science of reading.
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Chapter 2: Why did Nancy Madden and Bob Slavin create Success for All?
Sie suchten für Dinge, die funktionierten, Dinge, die Schulen tun könnten, um effektiv zu sein, um eine Unterschiede in den Kindern zu machen. And one day they were at Johns Hopkins eating lunch. And a former member of the Baltimore City School Board joined them at their table. Nancy says they struck up a conversation.
And so we're talking about how would you change the schools?
Things were not good in the Baltimore schools.
At the time, Baltimore City schools were failing half of their high school students. I mean, they were just dropping out. And he said, this is wrong. This is not good enough. And he issued a challenge. Here you are, Johns Hopkins University. You know, you're so smart.
Nancy und Bob hatten studiert, was in der Bildung funktioniert. Der Schulabgeordnete wollte wissen, was sie eigentlich tun würden, wenn es ihr Job wäre, ein Schulsystem zu reparieren.
Hier ist, was sie ihm gesagt haben.
So the former school board member said, I'll find the money, you go do it. Create a program that will help us fix the schools. Bob and Nancy started with preschool.
So we started with full-time pre-K for the language focus, because the first thing you have to do is get the language base laid before you even start thinking about letters and sounds and that sort of thing.
They developed a kindergarten program and a first grade program.
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Chapter 3: What was the impact of Success for All in schools?
In his study, Jeffrey Borman compared the costs of doing Success for All to not doing Success for All.
Although Success for All was a rather costly program, it still was so effective in preventing a lot of these other very costly interventions that in the long run it actually cost just the same but had all of these wonderful impacts on kids.
The main impact was the kids were better readers. Ja. The US Department of Education evaluates programs based on whether the research to support the program was rigorous and well designed. Success for all meets the highest standard for an evidence-based program. And that's what Steubenville was looking for 25 years ago. More on that after a break.
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Hey, it's Emily. Thanks for listening to Sold a Story. I'm here to tell you that producing work like this takes a lot of resources, reporters and editors and fact-checkers and engineers. And it takes a lot of time. I've been reporting on this topic for years. We rely on listener support to provide the resources to do this kind of work.
You can make a gift to support us today at soldastory.org slash donate or follow the link in the show notes. Thank you. It was the late 1990s and the Ohio legislature had just passed a new law. A law that said students were going to have to pass the state's fourth grade reading test to move on to fifth grade.
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Chapter 4: How did Jeffrey Borman contribute to the Success for All research?
They were looking for something different.
We wanted something that worked.
Richard Rinaldo war ein Assistenz-Supervorsitzender. Er erinnert sich, dass er zu Beratungen mit Staatsanwälten ging, die Städte anrufen, wie sie die Erhöhung der Lesungen verbessern können. Es war an einem dieser Beratungen, dass er über den Erfolg für alle lernte.
Und ich habe das mitgebracht. Und ich habe es gestern ausgemacht, weil ich wusste, dass Sie kommen würden.
Er hat ein Stück Papier zu unserer Interview mitgebracht. Es hat mehrere Programme, die damals vorhanden waren, aufgeführt, wie viel Forschungserfahrung es gab. Und Erfolg für alle ist... But before a district can adopt Success for All, teachers have to vote on it. Success for All requires a teacher vote. This is Nancy Madden.
If you want real change to occur, you don't need to be fighting against, you know, sabotage going on.
This is Melinda Young again, the Steubenville Superintendent. But just because all of the teachers voted yes on success for all, doesn't mean they were all enthusiastic about doing it.
Lynette Gorman, who was a new teacher at the time, says there was a big sticking point for many of the veteran teachers. They didn't like the scripts. Das heißt, es ist im Grunde das Gegenteil von Choose Your Own Adventure. Das hat immer einen kontroversen Aspekt des Programms. A teacher in Nevada told the Wall Street Journal in 1999 that Bob Slavin was, quote, killing creative teachers.
But remember, success for all was a collection of effective practices. Ingredients that studies showed would likely result in a good soup. But you had to follow the recipe. It wasn't going to work if everyone was choosing their own adventure. Teachers in Steubenville remember hours and hours of training, learning how to use the program. And I just remember tables full of pies.
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Chapter 5: Why did Steubenville adopt Success for All?
Es ist eine Anwendung, um lokalen Kontrolle zu schützen, was ein grundlegendes Prinzip in der amerikanischen Bildung ist. Also gab es ein Problem, eine Unterschiedlichkeit. Und als das Gesetz in Praxis wurde, wurde es müde.
Eine Sache, die passiert ist, viele Lesungsprogramme sagten, sie seien mit wissenschaftlicher Forschung verbunden, auch wenn sie keine Studien, die zeigten, dass sie gearbeitet haben, hatten. The other thing that happened, some Reading First officials and consultants were authors of reading programs.
And when they were giving presentations to state officials, Nancy Madden says they were promoting their own programs.
Their PowerPoints had examples and we were not on their list of examples.
Nancy says schools that were using Success for All started dropping it.
Our schools were told, you have to stop using Success for All. It's not on the reading first list. You cannot use it anymore.
To be clear, there was no official reading first list. Not from the federal government anyway. But some states were making lists. And when a state left Success for All off its list, the message seemed to be, Success for All isn't backed by research. It's not an evidence-based program. And that had a big impact on Success for All.
We had a staff of 500 people and we fired half of them. It was just awful.
And Bob Slavin?
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