Success for All (SFA) Model for Literacy Programs

Abstract

Success for All (SFA) is a standards-based curriculum model for teaching young children in preschool through fifth or sixth grade, especially those who are disadvantaged or attending underfunded schools. It develops reading proficiency through a variety of cooperative activities and individual attention, with the goal of all students achieving grade-level proficiency by the end of third grade. SFA is one of the most prominent examples of standards-based models for younger grades. Based on a model originally developed for the Baltimore school district, it has since been adopted by hundreds of schools.

Overview

Success for All is a standards-based school curriculum developed in 1987 for use in teaching children from early childhood through fifth grade. It focuses on reading and language skills on the premise that proficient reading at an early age is critical to lifetime academic success, and has been shown to improve test scores over time. The core element of the program is a daily ninety-minute period for reading instruction, in which students are grouped according to reading proficiency rather than age.

Psychologist Robert Slavin was hired by the Baltimore school system in 1986 to develop a new curriculum that would improve the educational outcomes of the poverty-stricken Baltimore schools. He built on his previous research on classroom management and cooperative learning, and developed SFA according to a large body of research on teaching methodologies. The pilot program was launched in Abbottston Elementary School, a school serving a low-income population, and had positive results. The Success for All Foundation was founded in 1998 and operated by Slavin and his wife Nancy Madden to develop and manage SFA as it was adopted by an increasing number of schools. By beginning of the twenty-first century, SFA was the most popular curriculum reform model in the United States.

When the No Child Left Behind Act passed in 2001, it included the Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) program, a program that provided funding for elementary and secondary schools to reform their curriculums according to research-tested methods. SFA was one of the primary curriculums promoted by CSR, which provided funds to schools from 2001-2005. In 2010, SFA foundation was granted roughly $50 million by the Department of Education to continue its development, promotion, and implementation of SFA.

While there are many standards-based curriculum models, SFA is designed specifically to address the needs of disadvantaged students in younger grades, and so is focused not on later curriculum content required for graduation, but basic academic skills, especially literacy, in no small part because of the assumption that reading skills are fundamental to or prerequisite for later academic success.

Considerable debate exists about the efficacy of SFA. While Slavin and the SFA foundation point to their Baltimore program and other examples in which test scores rose among students in SFA programs, other studies have found no increase at all (Chamberlain et al., 2007). A study of the use of SFA in Houston schools from 1998-2005, for example, found no statistically significant differences in reading proficiency between SFA and non-SFA students (Lorence, 2016). After the school system of Miami-Dade, Florida, the fourth largest school district in the country, adopted SFA programs in its worst-performing schools, it saw no gains. A study of the program's implementation in England found little quantifiable improvement, though reported high levels of teacher satisfaction (Hopkins et al., 1999). Even SFA's "Cadillac" schools, Abbotston and the other Baltimore-area schools, have been examined with questions raised as to whether the reported gains in reading proficiency were statistically significant or true of all students. Another study found not only that non-SFA Title I schools outperformed SFA Title I schools, but also that in neither group of schools did the literacy programs being used increase the reading proficiency of students who were already proficient; that is, what success was found was limited to students initially performing at remedial levels (Greenlee, 2001).

One of the specific critiques of SFA is that it is a schoolwide model, which does not allow schools and teachers to experiment with different models in the same school at the same time in order to find what best suits different bodies of students. Slavin has also been accused of failing to do sufficient implementation analysis in order to make the whole of SFA as rigorously researched as its component parts, most of which are predicated on prior work.

The SFA foundation responds to most claims of inefficacy by claiming in turn that the underperforming schools didn't implement SFA correctly or completely. Slavin has also criticized the research data and methodology of several SFA-critical studies, and has bolstered SFA's popularity by producing a large number of scholarly papers that critics claim are biased in SFA's favor and obfuscate its flaws and the validity of other curriculum models.

Further Insights

Specific goals in SFA include increasing attendance, reducing grade retention, reducing the need to place students in special education classes, and ensuring that all students read at grade level by their completion of third grade. Early education is influenced by the fact that children develop at different rates, which makes disparities in achievement at young ages unavoidable. SFA is designed with the intention of acknowledging those disparities among, for example, first graders, but setting goals for each student in order to smooth them out by the start of fourth grade, at which point most of the relevant aspects of child development have normalized. Early interventions are key, and ideally can reduce the number of students who later need to take special education classes.

SFA prescribes interventions in preschool to assist students in need of extra or targeted help, individual student-teacher interactions, and support to families. Typical activities called for by SFA include school readiness activities in preschool and kindergarten that center around language use, including written compositions, alphabet games, and storytelling (i.e., Early Learning Program); reading programs which group students according to reading level rather than age; and partner reading activities for students in grades 2 through 5. Reading Wings, for students grades 2 through 6, uses a school's existing text resources (novels, story anthologies, and basals) in order to improve reading comprehension and strategic reading. SFA later added programs beyond reading proficiency, including MathWings, a cooperative learning math program, and WorldLab, a grades 1-6 program for science and social studies. It also oversees early learning programs for toddlers and infants.

Assessments of each student's reading proficiency are conducted every eight weeks, and evaluated by a facilitator in order to make recommendations as to teaching strategies and tutoring, as well as to identify possible learning disabilities as early as possible. Teachers and tutors are trained for three days prior to each school year, in addition to follow-up meetings and progress reports throughout the year.

SFA family support teams work with parents to involve them in their child's education, and help to develop individual plans for each student. The team usually includes a representative of the administration (principal or vice-principal) as well as a facilitator and social worker. In some schools, family support teams include mental health services and community services professionals, such as pediatricians, family counselors, or members of family literacy programs.

Issues

SFA is a standards-based education (SBE) reform model. Since the 1980s, SBE models have replaced outcomes-based education (OBE) models as the dominant model of education reform. OBE, which in turn had replaced education systems that primarily emphasized teaching current students the same material that had been taught to past students, focuses on specific educational goals, or outcomes, and while methodology- and assessment-neutral, promotes teaching with the intention of a final outcome that consists of all the students achieving the same predetermined goals. In an OBE model, each course is constructed around a statement of what will have been learned by the end of the course, a goal that is clearly conveyed to students when it begins.

Curricula and syllabi are designed by working backwards from that goal in order to define the steps necessary to achieve it. Methodologies are not prescribed because OBE was meant to be a flexible student-centered model in which teachers can use different teaching styles as appropriate to the material and the students. Similarly, any method of assessment can be used, but the emphasis is on measuring students' skills or knowledge against the course goals. OBE remains the standard model of education in many countries, including India and much of the Europen Union, and continues to inform much of American educational policy, including the No Child Left Behind program, which combined OBE and SBE approaches, and its successor, the Every Student Succeeds Act.

The main elements of standards-based education are curriculums that identify specific, measurable knowledge or skills that each student is intended to learn (which it has in common with OBE) and the use of criterion-referenced tests, which measure each student's grasp of course material in comparison with a predefined standard rather than relative to other students' achievements. SBE is often associated with the use of high-stakes tests, which gained popularity in the 1990s and 2000s. High-stakes tests are criterion-referenced tests that have significant consequences for the test-taker, typically by acting as a gatekeeper to some special status.

High school graduation exams are high-stakes criterion-referenced tests, because they require a certain grade on the exam for the student to be able to graduate, even if their course grades and accumulated credits to that point are sufficient for graduation. Graduation exams were adopted by many states for public high school with the intention of guaranteeing that a high school diploma would therefore represent a specific minimum level of knowledge. Inevitably, this led to programs that would "teach the test"—that is, teach students only the specific material covered by the graduation exam, in order to guarantee graduation rates without necessarily meeting the broader goals that motivated the institution of those exams.

The fundamental premise of standards-based education is that educational attainment up to any given point should signify a certain corresponding level of knowledge and skill mastery. This is true not just of high school—so that a high school diploma can be taken to indicate certain basic levels of knowledge, useful to both employers and college admissions—but of prior grades, so that high schools can operate on the assumption that all incoming freshman have a certain level of competence, and middle schools can do likewise with regards to incoming seventh-graders. This also requires making sure that family income, race, gender, cultural background, family circumstances, and disability do not interfere with any student achieving those educational standards, and so requires schools to make special efforts for traditionally underserved students. Standards-based education, like SFA, frowns on social promotion—the longstanding practice of allowing a struggling student to pass on to the next grade of school in order to remain with their age-peers, rather than repeating a grade in order to achieve educational goals.

Note that although modern American educational ideology consistently calls for criterion-referenced testing, norm-referenced ranking, in which students' achievement levels are measured relative to one another, still influences many aspects of American education. While curving grades—the antithesis of standards-based education—is no longer common in either secondary or higher education, neither has it disappeared completely. The roles of valedictorian and salutatorian are dependent on norm-referenced ranking, and standardized tests used for college and university admissions—the SAT, ACT, GRE, and others—include both raw scores and scaled scores that reflect performance relative to other test-takers. Norm-referenced ranking plays a role in admissions to college and to specific merit-based programs, as well as to organizations such as MENSA, which sets as its admission requirement a test score in the 98th percentile, rather than a specific level of achievement or knowledge.

Terms & Concepts

Basal: Basal or basal reader is the term of art for a textbook normally known to students and parents as a "reader," consisting of simple stories selected in order to develop specific reading skills and organized in a sequence meant to match the student's progressive mastery of those skills. They have been in use since the nineteenth century, despite a brief-lived decline in the 1980s when phonics-based approaches were favored over skills-building approaches.

Criterion-Referenced Test: A type of test designed to assess what proportion of a body of knowledge or set of skills the test-taker has mastered; as opposed to a norm-referenced test that primarily measures whether the test-taker does better or worse than other test-takers. Criterion-referenced tests are often, but not always, high-stakes tests—tests where a minimum achievement is required for a specific reward, such as a driving test (which must be passed to be a licensed driver).

Graduation Exam: A graduation exam is a high-stakes criterion-referenced test administered to high school seniors, on the condition that a certain minimum score on the exam is a requirement for graduation, regardless of the student's credits and grades.

No Child Left Behind: A federal education program established in 2001, replacing the earlier GOALS 2000 program, that set educational goals for American public education; in 2015, the national elements of the program were repealed and more educational policy-setting power delegated to the states by the Every Student Succeeds Act, which nevertheless reflects the same broad goals.

Outcomes-Based Education (OBE): An approach to curriculum reform that emphasizes defining goals (outcomes) and then developing means by which every student can achieve those outcomes.

Standards-Based Education (SBE) Reform: An approach to education that calls for defining specific measurable standards for student knowledge and skill level and assessing student achievement according to those standards rather than according to class ranking and other relative assessments.

Title I School: Title I schools are those with a sufficiently large low-income student population, making them eligible to receive federal funding under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Bibliography

Chamberlain, A., Daniels, C., Madden, N. A., & Slavin, R. E. (2007). A randomized evaluation of the success for all middle school reading program. Middle Grades Research Journal, 2(1), 1–21. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=51835555&site=ehost-live

Greenlee, B. J., & Bruner, D. Y. (2001). Effects of success for all reading programs on reading achievement in title I schools. Education, 122(1), 177. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Academic Search Ultimate http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=5570460&site=ehost-live

Hanselman, P., & Borman, G. D. (2013). The impacts of success for all on reading achievement in grades 3–5: Does intervening during the later elementary grades produce the same benefits as intervening early? Educational Evaluation & Policy Analysis, 35(2), 237–251. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=87373419&site=ehost-live

Hopkins, D., Youngman, M., Harris, A., & Wordsworth, J. (1999). Evaluation of the initial effects and implementation of Success for All in England. Journal of Research in Reading, 22(3), 257. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=10452901&site=ehost-live

Hoyle, J. R., & Kutka, T. M. (2008). Maintaining America's egalitarian edge in the 21st century: Unifying K-12 and postsecondary education for the success of all students. Theory into Practice, 47(4), 353–362. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=34571367&site=ehost-live

Lorence, J., & Curiel, J. (2016). An evaluation of the effectiveness of success for all on the reading performance in the Houston Independent School District: 2000–2006. Conference Papers — American Sociological Association, 1–35.

Rakena, T., Airini, & Brown, D. (2016). Success for all: Eroding the culture of power in the one-to-one teaching and learning context. International Journal of Music Education, 34(3), 285–298. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=117394583&site=ehost-live

Slavin, R. E., & Madden, N. A. (2013). Taking Success for All to scale. Phi Delta Kappan, 95(3), 51–55. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=91859530&site=ehost-live

Slavin, R., & Madden, N. A. (2013). Success for All at 27: New developments in whole-school reform. Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk, 18(3/4), 169–176. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=92765687&site=ehost-live

Suggested Reading

Beatty, B. (2011). The dilemma of scripted instruction: Comparing teacher autonomy, fidelity, and resistance in the Froebelian kindergarten, Montessori, Direct Instruction, and Success for All. Teachers College Record, 113(3), 395–430. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=59902322&site=ehost-live

Chambers, B. B., Abrami, P., Tuck-Er, B., Slavin, R. E., Madden, N. A., Cheung, A., & Gifford, R. (2008). Computer-assisted tutoring in success for all: Reading outcomes for first graders. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 1(2), 120–137. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=44812933&site=ehost-live

Cheung, A., Ledesma, J. A., & Fung, A. (2009). The effectiveness of the Success for All reading programme on primary EAL pupils in Hong Kong. Effective Education, 1(2), 123–134. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=47194237&site=ehost-live