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[References Part A-L]Education Reforms and Students At Risk - October 1996
Any attempt to address the issue of "needed research on educating students placed at risk" shares some aspects of the task of delineating "needed water in the Sahara." There is a great deal that needs doing, and very modest evidence of the political will to do it.
Research to date has paid several dividends. This study and others have clearly demonstrated that it is entirely possible for schools serving large numbers of students placed at risk to help bring those students to levels of education far above levels traditionally achieved by disadvantaged groups. The evidence is particularly strong in the area of elementary school education, where we now know enough about curricula, instructional practices, staff development and behavior, and school climate to bring the average achievement levels of disadvantaged first graders up to or above current national averages by the end of elementary school. Several schools visited as part of our study have in fact demonstrated that such a goal is reachable. We also know from previous research that such goals are more often reached by elementary than middle or high schools, but in the case of these higher levels as well, this study and selected previous evaluations have demonstrated specific practices and more or less coordinated strategies that work effectively to increase students' engagement, achievement, and expectations for continuing education. What is needed now is a coherent and sustained program of applied research and evaluation studies of the conditions that foster or cripple valuable school-based reforms for students placed at risk.
The problems facing poor children in our schools are immense and complex. Understanding these problems well enough to design reasonably cutting-edge research requires the long-term development of specialized skills on the parts of research teams. Low or sporadic levels of funding virtually guarantee that such understandings will never develop among communities of researchers. Creating national centers focused on the education of economically disadvantaged and multicultural/multilingual communities and expanding funding for unsolicited proposals related to students placed at risk represent important initial steps toward creating a unified research program. Further steps in this direction, perhaps targeted at the $6,000,000,000 per year Title I program, must also be taken. Just as school-level reform almost certainly requires a reasonably stable foundation of support, the absence of sustained support for education research on students placed at risk will result in the loss of quality researchers to other areas.
The nation's school systems are spending billions of dollars implementing diverse and often untested reform strategies involving millions of young Americans. New "miracle cures," which promise positive results in weeks or years, abound. In this context, a national 1 percent set-aside to systematically study "Which reforms succeed, where, when, and why?" and "Under what circumstances will no reform succeed?" would be a very prudent investment. Certainly such a set-aside budget would represent an addition of some size to the nation's education research budget, but over the long haul will be much less expensive than the costs currently being borne by the thousands of schools attempting dubious school improvement efforts. Coordinated nationally, at the federal level, this research would inform practitioner efforts from North Carolina and New Hampshire to Washington and New Mexico.
Applied research of this sort can be meaningfully supported by systematic, third-party evaluations of diverse reform efforts. In this project, we visited one school attempting each of six reforms, and two schools attempting each of six additional reforms. The previous national evaluation of the School Dropout Demonstration Assistance Program (Rossi, in press) and the ongoing Special Strategies Studies (Stringfield et al., 1994 and in press) have gathered detailed, multiyear data on selected schools attempting more than 20 reform approaches, plus point-in-time data on as many as four replicates of each of these reform approaches. To determine the effectiveness of any of these reforms with more than modest precision would require efforts five-to-seven times the size of all three of these studies combined. In addition, several of the nation's most widely hailed school reform designs/programs have never been subjected to so much as one moderate scale, proactive, controlled, multiyear study. As citizens, we might well ask why the rigorous testing and standards used to ensure public safety in areas of medicine and automobile manufacturing, for example, are so noticeably absent from the implementation of new education reforms.
Finally, any serious research program seeking to improve education reforms for students at risk must reform current information dissemination approaches and practices. At present, the dissemination of research findings related to students placed at risk is chaotic. Much of the chaos is related to our current lack of standards as to what should be regarded as research, so that virtually every self-styled school or program-improvement scheme is marketed as "research based," regardless of how plausible the claim. Chaos and confusion also result from the fact that several of the more widely subscribed magazines in education seem committed to a "miracle of the month" strategy of educational improvement (a situation made worse by the absence until recently of refereed journals targeted at programs and persons serving students at risk). The National Diffusion Network (NDN), originally conceived as a channel of useful information for practice, has fallen short of its goals for three reasons: (1) NDN procedures for identifying model programs are cumbersome and often poorly understood by practitioners; (2) the NDN has funded no independent research or evaluation activities related to validating the effectiveness of its "proven" programs; and (3) the NDN has provided such modest inducements for programs to participate that many of the better-regarded programs have simply declined to apply.
Clearly what is needed is a dissemination system that piggybacks upon a coordinated research program and works through established networks to reach teachers, administrators, and support staff. A good part of what must be disseminated is an appreciation of the grounds for claiming program effectiveness, so that the process of dissemination itself will lead to increased care about quality research standards. We must begin, in short, by educating our consumers; then we must do our best to meet their expectations.
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[Implications for Policy and Practice] [References Part A-L]