A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Education Reforms and Students At Risk - October 1996

Study Aims and Study Questions

Study Aims

• Provide an assessment of the current state of the art with respect to research, policy, and practice concerned with educating students at risk.
• Recommend strategies that will assist those engaged in improving the education-related outcomes of students at risk.
• Pay special attention to three aspects of school reforms -- raising academic standards, enhancing the academic climate of schools and out-of-school environments, and preventing dropouts and providing second chance programs -- that have special implications for students who are educationally at risk. For example:
• • Assess how schools have managed to implement higher academic standards for all students without creating inequities for certain categories of disadvantaged students.
  • Assess how schools have enhanced the climate on campus to encourage student learning and how they have assisted in the process of improving out-of-school learning environments for their students.
  • Assess how dropout prevention and second-chance programs work to increase student engagement in learning activities.

Study Questions

OERI's overarching mandate for the 12 studies of education reforms, of which this study of reforms for students at risk was one, called for several general questions to be explored by each study. These questions can be clustered into three categories: design, implementation, and impact.

Design

• What are the key characteristics of model approaches in this area? How do the reformed approaches differ from traditional practice and from prior practice in particular sites?
• What key characteristics cut across successful programs? What characteristics are missing from less successful programs in this area? Why are particular aspects of model approaches especially important?
• What are the purposes of these reforms? Are those aims different from traditional practice and from prior practice in particular sites?
• What role is played by research, research-based knowledge, and other information designing these reforms? What evidence documents that role?

Implementation

• What are the circumstances that permitted or encouraged the initiation, development, and sustenance of these reforms? To what degree, and how, can these or similar circumstances be reproduced in other settings? How must different approaches be adapted to particular settings?
• What are the principal incentives for reform? What have been the major barriers to the initiation, development and implementation of the reform, and how have those been overcome? What federal, state, district, or school policies or practices facilitate or inhibit these reforms?
• What resources were required to design, develop, implement, or sustain the reform, including staff time, training, space, materials, and supplies? If extra funds were required, how much extra was needed, what was the source of those funds, and how were they obtained? How were total costs and extra costs related to the number of students covered by the reform?
• What role was played by research, research-based knowledge, and other information in implementing these reforms? What evidence documents that role?

Impact

• What strategies and approaches have been developed to assess the impact of these reforms for at-risk students? How do these approaches separate the impact of the reforms from the impact of other factors that might affect outcomes? How can these assessments be used to refine the reform?
• What has been the impact of these reforms, particularly the impact on students, and especially the impact on student performance?
• What are the anticipated and unanticipated benefits and difficulties associated with this reform? How can those benefits be reproduced and those difficulties be avoided in other jurisdictions wishing to implement similar reforms?
• What role was played by research, research-based knowledge, and other information in assessing the impact of these reforms? What evidence documents that role?
• Overall, what are the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, and what is the likelihood that other jurisdictions could adopt the approach or adapt it to fit their particular circumstances?

In addition to these general questions concerning education reforms, specific questions were posed by the proposal request for this study. These questions also were clustered into three areas of focus: raising academic standards, enhancing the learning climate of schools and out-of-school environments, and promoting student engagement through dropout prevention and second-chance programs.

Raising Academic Standards

• What has been the impact of raised standards on staff and school programs? Has it affected what these people do and how they do it? For example, have instructional roles for teachers and other staff changed at all? Has the student role changed at all?
• Have any changes in student instructional groupings taken place and, if so, what was the impact? Was tracking eliminated or handled more flexibly? Has instruction become more individualized?
• Have special forms of instructional assistance been increased -- e. g., pull-out programs, adult volunteer aides, peer tutoring, use of technology?
• What kind of staff development took place to accommodate the changes? How well did it work?
• Have raised standards had any effect on the nonacademic parts of the school program or its participants, e. g., nonacademic courses, extracurricular clubs, sports? Is there any evidence that increased academic standards are eliminating alternative avenues of school success for nonacademically able or oriented students, and if so, what effect is it having on those students?

Enhancing the Learning Climate of Schools and Out-of-School Environments

• What strategies were employed to change the school climate? To what extent are these strategies dependent upon personal authority, and which strategies can be universally transferred to other settings?
• What strategies were employed to affect the peer culture?
• What strategies were employed to affect the out-of-school environment? How necessary are out-of-school strategies to the overall reform effort of providing safe and orderly learning environments for students? What role can be played by the business community, by churches, and by other civic organizations to enhance the out-of-school environment of at-risk students?
• Is there any necessary correspondence between the strategies used to obtain and maintain discipline and the strategies to increase interest in the curriculum? Can some strategies for enforcing order actually detract from the curriculum?

Promoting Student Engagement Through Dropout Prevention and Second-Chance Programs

• What mechanisms are used to identify students who were at risk of dropping out, and how well do they work?
• What forms of dropout prevention programs seem to work best, for particular types of students?
• What are the relative costs and benefits of dropout prevention programs that begin in middle school versus those that begin in high school?
• Is there any way to create a dropout prevention program that prevents labeling or stigmatizing the students in it?
• What are effective methods of drawing students into second-chance programs? ? Which second-chance programs seem to work best for particular types of students?
• Can we learn anything from students who are in, or are candidates for, second-chance programs about possible dropout prevention programs that would lessen the need for second-chance programs?
• What can we learn from dropout programs about approaches for integrating educational and social services to help at-risk youth?

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[Summary of Literature Review Part 4] [Study Aims and Study Questions Part 2]