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[Study Aims and Questions Part 1]Education Reforms and Students At Risk - October 1996
Emerging Strategies
The size and scope of Title I make the program an important leader for change in compensatory education. Title I was reauthorized in 1988 under the Hawkins-Stafford Elementary and Secondary School Improvement Amendments, which were touted as the first "education-based" reforms to Title I. The amendments were designed to increase accountability for student performance, provide opportunities for greater flexibility in pursuit of improved performance, stress higher order thinking in addition to basic skills, and increase emphasis on parent involvement. One of the most significant changes brought about by the new legislation was the provision for greater flexibility in the coordination of Title I resources with the regular school program by enabling schools with 75 percent or more students eligible for free lunches to use Title I funds for schoolwide programs (LeTendre, 1991; Winfield, 1991; for an evaluation of a schoolwide program see De Baca, Rinaldi, Billig, and Kinnison, 1991; for critiques of Hawkins-Stafford implementation, see, e. g., Clayton, 1991; Slavin and Madden, 1991; Stringfield, Billig and Davis, 1991; Fagan and Heid, 1991; Miller, 1992).
Early Prevention. A view that prevailed during the 1960s, that early intervention programs targeting very young children provided the most cost-effective compensatory education for disadvantaged youth, enjoyed a comeback in the 1980s as educators and policymakers supported programs designed to ensure that students enter and progress through school "ready to learn." There may be a tendency to overemphasize the advantages of early intervention (Woodhead, 1988; Natriello, McDill, and Pallas, 1990). However, early childhood programs can help provide a firmer foundation for later school success (Slavin, Karweit, and Wasik, 1991; U. S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1992; McKey et al., 1985; Karweit, 1987; Slavin, Karweit, and Madden, 1989; Karweit and Wasik, 1992; Karweit, 1992a; Slavin, Karweit, and Wasik, in press; DeFord et al., 1987; Madden et al., 1991; Madden et al., 1993, Howard and Andrew, 1978; Lloyd, 1978; Kelly, Veldman, and McGuire, 1964).
Multicultural education. Multiculturalism has been the subject of enormous debate in recent years (American Educator, 1991a; Ravitch, 1990). The idea of "multicultural education" has most often been associated with specific changes in curriculum (for a program evaluation, see, e. g., Gottfredson, Nettles, and McHugh, 1992). Studies suggest that active learning in combination with "scaffolding" (building upon the cultural knowledge that children bring to the classroom) may enhance the learning of young people of color (Guitierrez, 1992; Lee, 1992; Peterson, 1991). Proponents decry the Anglo-centric bias of traditional learning materials and argue for the integration of more diverse, positive images, historical role models, and, in general, a more balanced view of history that represents the experiences and perspectives of marginalized groups (see, e. g., Sobol, 1990). Critics of the multiculturalism movement view this kind of curriculum program as potentially divisive and even "anti-American" because it encourages students to seek their primary identity in a particular ethnic group rather than in a united American culture (Schlesinger, 1991; Bennet, 1991; Ravitch, 1991-1992).
Another aspect of multicultural education is the issue of bilingual education, which also has been embroiled in controversy and debate since the passage of the federal Bilingual Education Act in 1968. The conflict can be seen in the English-only movement versus the English-Plus coalition (McGroarty, 1992), in proposals for a bilingual immersion program in which "both language-majority and language-minority students learn each others' languages while continuing to develop their own," (Cziko, 1992) and in the alternative perspectives on how bilingual education should be offered in schools (i. e., either as a tool to help minority students assimilate into the American mainstream, or as a second-language acquisition that adds to the linguistic resources an individual already possesses) (Alvarez-Pease and Kenji, 1992).
Changes in curriculum. In addition to multicultural education efforts, other initiatives reject the special education model of offering more of the same content at a (perhaps) slower pace by making the school curriculum more engaging and relevant. A number of curriculum projects have been developed that focus on real-world experiences for the learning content. Examples include the microsociety school (Richmond, 1989), experiential learning projects (Blumfeld et al., 1991; Erickson and Shultz, 1992; Means et al., 1991), Action Learning Projects from Minnesota's Project Together (Daniels, 1983), the Foxfire student publishing experience (Wigginton, 1989), the Algebra Project (Moses et al., 1989), and various community service programs (Coleman et al., 1974; Nettles, 1991a, b; Newmann and Rutter, 1985-86; Schine, 1988). At the same time, comprehensive plans are being pursued by major national groups to completely restructure the curriculum for active student learning of higher order competencies through real-world applications in each major subject across the grades (Jackson, 1992; National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1989; Anderson et al., 1989). If all students are to benefit from these developments, resources must be available to implement ambitious curriculum changes in all schools, including those attended by poor children and children of color that presently are not adequately funded for instruction in the traditional curriculum.
Many middle and high school students are more motivated to work hard if they view classroom learning tasks to be useful in the adult world of work. In general, researchers have found that poor school performance, early school leaving, and rebellious behavior suggests that the school program is not relevant to students' current and longer term social and economic interests (Oakes, 1989, 1992; Gamoran and Berends, 1987). But traditional vocational education has frequently been criticized as lacking sufficient academic content and failing to prepare students with well-defined marketable skills (Educational Testing Service, 1990b). These problems have a particularly strong impact on poor children and children of color since they are disproportionately represented in vocational programs (Braddock, 1990). The 1990 reauthorization of the Carl D. Perkins Vocational Education Act explicitly encourages the integration of academic and vocational programs (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1990; Bottoms and Presson, 1989; for overviews of academic/vocational integration models, see, e. g., Bottoms and Presson, 1989; Educational Testing Service, 1990b; Grubb, Davis, and Lum, cited in National Center for Research in Vocational Education, 1991; for compendiums of dropout prevention programs, see Hahn and Danzberger, 1987; National Committee for Citizens in Education, 1988; OERI, 1987; Orr, 1990).
Changes in instruction. Accompanying changes in the curriculum designed to make it more engaging for students at risk are changes in traditional forms of instruction. In general, these instructional strategies entail a movement away from the passive teacher-lecture/student-listen mode of instruction to a more active arrangement of learning activities. They also suggest that effective "instruction" can take place within and outside the classroom and that a personal connection with a "teacher" can make a difference in whether a student succeeds or fails. Specific strategies include the involvement of nontraditional teachers such as mentors and race-gender role models, adult and cross-grade peer tutoring, and integrating technology as a tool for instruction. There is considerable debate about the effectiveness and appropriateness of these proposals (Flaxman, Ascher, and Harrington, 1988; Freedman, 1988, 1991; McPartland and Nettles, 1991; Maeroff, 1990; Lipsitz, 1984; Lightfoot, 1983; McPartland, 1992; U. S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families, 1989; Gibbs, 1988; Ascher, 1991; Cooper, 1990; Holland, 1987; Lawton, 1990; Merwin, 1990; Southern Education Foundation, 1990; Tifft, 1990; Fordham and Ogbu, 1986; NAACP Legal Defense Fund, 1991, cited in Ascher, 1991; Butler, 1987; American Association of University Women Education Foundation, 1992; Pease-Alvarez and Kenji, 1992; Epstein and Karweit, 1983; Coleman, 1961; Elder, 1968; Fordham and Ogbu, 1986; Spilman, 1990; Cohen, Kulik, and Kulik, 1982; Natriello, McDill, and Pallas, 1990; Cohen et al., 1982; Slavin, 1986; Levin et al., 1984, 1986; Wasik and Slavin, 1990; Niemiec, Blackwell, and Walberg, 1986; Electronic Learning, 1988; Becker, 1986; Johnson, 1992; Pogrow, 1988, 1990a, 1990b; Ross, Smith, and Morrison; 1991; David, 1991).
Changes in assessment. Critics of conventional testing and assessment methods argue that such assessment tools as standardized, objective tests often do more harm than good, especially for underachieving students. Alternative forms of assessment and reward structures are being proposed and developed. These alternative assessment strategies are designed to have students demonstrate what they have learned rather than how well they take a test, and to motivate rather than discourage students who start out well below average. Examples of potentially better assessment methods include oral interviews, science experiments, portfolios of student's work over an extended period of time, public exhibitions where students answer questions on their senior projects, and performances of skills in simulated situations (Perrone, 1991; Wolf et al., 1991; U. S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, 1992; Mac Iver, 1991).
Organizational strategies. Extensive research evidence indicates that a supportive climate for learning can be severely damaged by the very large secondary schools that are typical of major urban and suburban districts where many students at risk are enrolled (Toch, 1991; Gottfredson and Gottfredson, 1985; Bryk and Thum, 1989; Maeroff, 1992; Barker and Gump, 1964; Diprete, 1982; Garbarino, 1978, 1980; Morgan and Alwin, 1980). There is no evidence that new, smaller schools are now being constructed for the middle and high school grades, but many smaller units are being created within larger schools (Toch, 1991; Fine, 1992). While these programs are promising, Maeroff (1992) notes that opportunities for sustained, close, positive contacts between students and teachers will only be achieved if such arrangements are more than administrative units that change each year for particular students and have no programs of adult guidance and support for individual students.
Most American middle and high schools, and many elementary schools, are departmentalized --i. e., students receive daily instruction from several different teachers because each teacher specializes in a single subject. This practice is nearly universal in high schools and is almost as common in the middle grades; it is often reinforced by certification regulations that stipulate the use of only specialized teachers in the secondary grades. The rationale for such regulations is that the instructional content of each academic subject in the secondary grades requires teachers who are experts in the area, and that instruction will be of higher quality when teachers can take special pride in their subject-matter discipline and can concentrate on preparing a limited number of outstanding lessons each day that are offered to several different classes. Although research supports some of the instructional benefits of departmentalized staffing, the risks that many students will not encounter a climate of caring and support have been more strongly documented (McPartland, 1990; Bryk, Lee, and Smith, 1990). Two structural approaches may help to offset the negative effects of departmentalized staffing: "semi-departmentalization" in which the number of different specialized teachers assigned to each student in middle and secondary grades is limited (McPartland, 1990); and interdisciplinary teacher teams that have specific team-member responsibilities for the success of each student (McPartland, 1991; Robinson, 1991; Lipsitz, 1984; Merenbloom, 1986; Arhar, 1992; Alexander and George, 1981; Mac Iver, 1990; Maeroff, 1990; Connors, 1992).
Alternatives to tracking have been proposed but not evaluated. These alternatives include various approaches to limit the use of separate classes for instruction and various methods to make the heterogeneously mixed class work well when tracking is eliminated. Tracking can be limited in several ways, including regrouping in only one or two courses (such as math and reading) while keeping all others randomly mixed; assigning students to track levels on the basis of course-specific data (so that a high-track assignment in one subject and a low-track assignment in another subject can occur for the same student); restricting the number of different track levels in the same course (such as a gifted section and a broad general section); and assigning extra resources and the most talented teachers to classes with the most needy students (Braddock and McPartland, 1990).
Simply eliminating tracking to equalize educational opportunities will produce classes of students with wide ranges of backgrounds and achievements in which special problems of student motivation, teacher effectiveness, and classroom climate must be addressed (Oakes, 1986; Braddock and McPartland, 1990). Student motivation can suffer when earning high grades is too easy for those at the top of the academic distribution and too difficult for those at the bottom. Teacher effectiveness can decline when classroom materials for a whole group lesson are poorly matched to the prior preparation of various students, such as reading matter that is geared to a single grade level when student reading skills range over several grade levels. The classroom climate can also be weakened in a heterogeneous class when discipline problems arise with students who feel they cannot perform acceptably on the assigned tasks.
Experiments to modify the structure of classroom competition indicate new directions for giving all students in heterogeneously grouped classes an opportunity to earn recognition and rewards for academic accomplishments. The basic idea is to establish individual benchmarks from which to calculate student growth, progress, and improvement for rewarding individual efforts at school work. Evaluations have found that frequent rewards do positively influence motivation, grades, self-reported effort and interest, and teachers' expectations (Beady and Slavin, 1980; Slavin, 1980; Mac Iver, 1991; Beady et al., 1981).
Modifications of classroom curriculum materials and learning activities may also help teachers deal successfully with heterogeneous classrooms. There are only a few published examples of such efforts and no formal evaluations of how they work (Epstein and Salinas, 1992; Romberg, 1983; Oakes, 1986). The most commonly used structure to deal with the diversity of students in heterogeneous classrooms, which can turn that diversity into an advantage, is cooperative learning. Cooperative learning methods include many approaches for heterogeneously grouped classrooms that create roles of high status and responsibility for each student in the class and that establish a positive peer climate for learning (Slavin, 1990; Cohen, 1986). Numerous evaluation studies have shown positive effects for both below- and above-average students on academic achievement and on student acceptance and respect of their peers who come from different backgrounds (Slavin, 1983, 1990; Cohen, 1984; Skon, Johnson, and Johnson, 1979, 1981). Other versions of cooperative learning assign roles to students that emphasize the special strengths or knowledge of each individual, to build status in the group and commitment to group-learning goals (Cohen, 1986).
In addition to departmentalization and tracking alternatives, schools can also institutionalize direct connections between success in school and the student's future education and employment opportunities. In this vein, schools can (a) provide better information about student behaviors in school to employment agents and college admissions officers; (b) offer specific employment opportunities or college financial aid to students who meet particular school performance standards; and (c) include actual college and work experiences as part of middle and high school learning activities.
Employers who are hiring recent high school graduates have little information from schools on which to base their decisions (Crain, 1984), even though many aspects of school behavior are useful indicators that a job candidate is dependable, can work well as a team leader or member, or has other special job-related talents. Most students know that their high school record of attendance, grades, test scores, and extracurricular activities has little meaning in the employment process, so there is little incentive from the labor market to do well on these criteria (Bishop, 1987, 1989). New ways have been proposed for assembling records of academic and nonacademic accomplishments and for providing the information in a timely and convenient form in the job recruitment and selection process. Career Passport and Worklink are two examples of such initiatives (for overviews of these programs, see Charner, 1988; Educational Testing Service, 1990a, b; Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1990).
Many middle and high school students also see little connection between their school behavior and later opportunities for college. In this case, the problem is more likely to be an absence of knowledge by students of college admissions processes than a need for better information by colleges about their student applicants. Students often do not know the required courses they need to take during the middle and high school grades to qualify for college admissions in major fields that can lead to a chosen career. Students in these grades may also discount entrance into many more selective colleges because they are unaware of available sources of financial aid. Such lack of knowledge prevents students from seeing the current relevance of working hard in challenging courses to earn admission to more selective colleges or to preferred major fields. Current programs such as Upward Bound provide knowledge on college prerequisites and the college admissions process to students at risk in their middle and high school years (for program overviews and evaluations, see U. S. Department of Education, 1991; Natriello, McDill, and Pallas, 1990; Burkheimer et al., 1979; Myers, in press; U. S. General Accounting Office, 1991).
In addition to increasing the flow of important, relevant information on jobs and continuing educational opportunities, schools can create direct links with employers. The Summer Training and Education Program (STEP), developed by Public/Private Ventures, is a particularly well-implemented and unusually well-evaluated program designed to provide underachieving 14-15-year-olds from low-income families with extra help in academics, life skills, and work experience during two consecutive summers. Students also are provided with ongoing support during the intervening school year (Branch, Milliner, and Bumbaugh, 1986; Sipe, Grossman, and Milliner, 1987, 1988; Walker and Vilella-Vilez, 1992).
Other strategies and programs also create links between school and employment and college aid. Agreements between local businesses and school systems can guarantee students job interviews, actual employment, or direct assistance in applying and paying for college, in return for maintaining good high school attendance rates and grade-point averages. Examples include the Boston Compact, the Baltimore Commonwealth and Collegebound Foundation, and the Cleveland Collegebound Foundation. But these efforts have been criticized as being ineffective because the guaranteed rewards are too distant to affect student behavior and the criteria are too inflexible to appeal to those students who most need added incentives to improve school behaviors (Gottfredson, 1988).
We have little rigorous evaluation evidence of the effects of various strategies for providing better information to students or for offering college or employment rewards for good school behavior (U. S. General Accounting Office, 1990a; Betsey et al., 1985). The following suggestion appears valid: More effective programs will require a comprehensive approach that begins in the middle grades. This approach would combine more information to the student with personalized guidance services on college and career opportunities and requirements (U. S. General Accounting Office, 1990b) and an incentive program. The incentive program would offer immediate payoffs such as contributions to students' college savings accounts or actual chances for paid employment that are tied to short-term school records and incremental improvements in individual student behaviors in school (Gottfredson, 1988; Natriello, McDill, and Pallas, 1990).
Learning activities in middle and high school can be directly connected to the worlds of college or work so that the transition between different domains becomes a gradual experience, rather than school being merely a preparation for the college and career events that follow high school graduation. Current examples include tech-prep offerings that permit high school students to take part of their program at the local community college, cooperative education programs that coordinate learning experiences at the workplace with learning activities in the classroom, school-to-work apprenticeship programs, community college co-op programs, and high school programs to integrate academic and vocational offerings with experiential learning activities (U. S. General Accounting Office, 1991; Hoyt, 1991; Hamilton, 1990). These reform efforts are still in the early stages of development but show real promise for convincing students of the relevance of their school work for achieving college and career goals by directly linking their middle and high school learning activities to college and worksite locations and experiences.
A final way in which schools can be better organized to serve the needs of poor children and children of color is by strengthening school-community ties. In the last two decades, education practitioners and researchers have begun to realize that schools need help to improve appreciably the academic performance and social behavior of the most disadvantaged segment of the at-risk school population (Dryfoos, 1991; Natriello, McDill, and Pallas, 1990).
To address the diversity of these student problems and behaviors, school systems are attempting to implement multifaceted and coordinated approaches in collaboration with public and private community agencies and parents. Long-standing mandates for parental and community involvement exist in the most prominent federal compensatory education programs such as Head Start, Title I, and Title I. However, "the shared responsibilities of families, schools, and communities are not well-understood nor well-developed in family practice, school practice, or community practice" (Center on Families, Schools, Communities, and Children's Learning, 1990).
Two distinct but compatible perspectives have emerged regarding how to deal with the deterioration within and among schools, communities, and families (Natriello, McDill, and Pallas, 1990). Wilson's (1987) prescription advocates reindustrializing and economically revitalizing inner cities. A second perspective, which is our concern here, argues for a strengthening of the bonds among the key educating institutions --the family, community, and school -- to educate students at risk more successfully (see, e. g., Epstein, 1992). A specific way in which some schools are addressing the personal problems that impede students' learning is by integrating and coordinating the social services needed by many students at risk (for evaluations of existing integration and coordination efforts, see, e. g., Levy, 1979; Mathtech, Inc., 1991; Dolan, 1992; New Jersey Department of Human Resources, 1988; Dryfoos, 1991; Cohen, 1989, 1991; Deputy Superintendent of San Diego City Schools, 1990; Joining Forces, no date; Grannis, Riehl, Pallas, Lever, Randolph, and Jewell, 1988; Grannis, 1991).
In this review, we have concentrated on efforts to improve the schools and environment of poor children and children of color. Many of the reforms targeted at this population may suggest ways of making schools more effective for all students. High academic achievement and success in adult life is most likely when children receive resources, incentives, and a "push" to excel from the multiple social systems that they participate in. The level of academic failure tolerated in our school systems is incompatible with current economic and social objectives.
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[Summary of Literature Review Part 3] [Study Aims and Questions Part 1]