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

Strengthening Learning Opportunities in the Classroom

If students are to be held more accountable for their academic performance and made to face consequences for not meeting standards, schools must provide adequate opportunities for students to meet expectations on time. Schools must embrace a comprehensive approach to ending social promotion by using data effectively to identify at-risk students early, before they fall too far behind; ensuring that all students have access to highly qualified and well-trained teachers; and taking advantage of research-based practices to enhance student achievement. These practices include alternative student grouping, cooperative learning, tutoring, and reducing class size. Schools must also be prepared to accommodate students with special needs.

Identify and intervene early with students at risk of falling behind

As education researcher Linda Darling-Hammond explains, "Ensuring that students get the specific help they need requires rich information about what they know and can do as well as how they learn."

If you are going to have the standards, you're going to have to have support for the standards. You have to give students an opportunity. Don't just say "sink or swim." —Philadelphia parent

Not all students who experience difficulty in school do so for the same reasons. Some students have learning disabilities, others have behavioral problems, are not ready for school, or face other challenges in their families and in their lives outside school. Some students barely miss meeting the standards while others perform at levels considerably behind their peers. The point is that in order to help all students meet standards, educators must understand the nature of children's difficulties, and they must do so early.

High-quality assessment data can be used in a variety of ways: to inform teachers about gaps in their students' learning; to inform students and their parents about the academic areas to which they need to devote more attention and those in which they are succeeding; to help schools evaluate their proficiency; and to enable the public to learn how successful their schools have been in improving student achievement. As the example below illustrates, assessment is useful only to the extent that it can inform teachers and be used for ongoing student and school improvement.

Yet, districts and schools have found it difficult to use data effectively. Schools cannot rely solely on aggregated data from state or district assessments to determine how well students are performing because such information usually lacks the depth to adequately identify particular problems and design interventions accordingly. More important, state and district assessments generally come too late in the game. By third or fourth grade, when most states administer their first standards-based assessments, students with special needs may already be well behind, and each passing year makes it more difficult to catch up.

In order to properly address student needs, principals and teachers need to gather rich data on individual student performance and gather that data often. Schools must also use student data to continuously improve their programs and classroom practices. School staff need to have access to the assessment data gathered on their students by the state and district, and they need to know how to read and interpret the data.

Ensure that there is a well-prepared teacher in every classroom

To be successful, strategies to improve student achievement require good teachers. Yet recent research reveals a troubling picture of the state of our nation's teaching force. According to the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF), which compiled hundreds of studies on the subject, more than one-quarter of newly hired teachers have not fully met licensing standards; 12 percent enter with no license at all and another 15 percent enter with only a temporary, provisional, or emergency license.

School districts should make every effort to...provide systematic supports for ongoing professional development. Such opportunities should give teachers sustained opportunities--not just hit-and-run workshops--for learning about successful teaching strategies. This requires scheduled time for teachers to plan and study together, to learn about effective strategies, to examine curriculum and student work, to observe good practice, and to give and receive coaching. —Linda Darling-Hammond

Compounding the problem is the fact that many teachers lack expertise in the subject they are teaching. Overall, nearly 28 percent of teachers of academic subjects have neither an undergraduate major nor a minor in their main assignment fields.⁽³⁴⁾

High rates of retention and social promotion in many of our schools underscore the need to employ well-qualified and well-prepared teachers. Efforts to end social promotion must include systemic changes in teacher preparation, recruitment, and support. States and districts must end the practices of hiring unqualified teachers and provide incentives for highly qualified teachers to teach in high-poverty schools. The drive to boost student achievement, coupled with the ongoing efforts to implement standards-based reform, demands a radically altered professional development structure.

Teachers need to deepen their content knowledge and learn new teaching methods. While more than half of full-time public school teachers report participation in various professional development programs, many of the activities offered are not adequately designed to address classroom instruction. The very concept of professional development needs to be broadened.

In accordance with research findings and the professional development practices of exemplary districts and schools across the nation, the U.S. Department of Education has developed 10 principles of high-quality professional development. Professional development:

1. Recognizes that teachers are central to student learning, yet includes all other members of the school community;

2. Focuses on individual, collegial, and organizational improvement;

3. Respects and nurtures the intellectual and leadership capacity of teachers, principals, and others in the school community;

4. Reflects the best available research and practice in teaching, learning, and leadership;

5. Enables teachers to develop further expertise in subject content, teaching strategies, use of technologies, and other essential elements of teaching to high standards;

6. Promotes continuous inquiry and improvement embedded in the daily life of schools;

7. Is planned collaboratively by those who will participate in and facilitate the activity;

8. Requires substantial time and other resources;

9. Is driven by a coherent long-term plan; and

10. Is evaluated ultimately on the basis of its impact on teacher effectiveness and student learning. This assessment of effectiveness guides subsequent professional development efforts.

States, school districts, and schools can also help ensure that every classroom has a good teacher by:

• Providing mentors for new teachers. To successfully navigate their first year of teaching, new teachers need the support and guidance a veteran teacher can provide. Peer mentoring helps schools retain the most talented and qualified teachers.

• Preparing teachers to encourage family involvement. Strategies on how to work with families and engage them in their children's schooling rarely appear in the curricula of most professional development programs. Yet parents often perceive teachers as unwilling to accept, or uninterested in having, their participation. To have successful parental involvement, schools must operate under the assumption that most parents really do want to help their children succeed in school.⁽³⁵⁾ Teachers need to develop a broad range of skills and knowledge in order to work effectively with parents.

• Establishing teacher networks. Teacher networks bring colleagues together to focus on subject matter and to deepen teachers' teaching skills and comprehension of content. They offer teachers a professional community in which they can share ideas, experience, and expertise and serve as a support for one another. Networks are highly respected by teachers and appear to have positive effects on teacher motivation, knowledge of subject matter, and teaching strategies.

One of the most critical areas on which we, as a nation, need to focus is what we must do to prepare the next generation of teachers. In the next ten years we need to recruit 2.2 million teachers....Teachers are the heart and soul of the renaissance of American education, but they are being asked to know more and do more than ever before. We need to give them support so they can continue to help our children learn to high standards. —Richard Riley, Secretary of Education

• Providing incentives for teachers to become certified and teach in high-poverty schools. The problems of high teacher turnover, under qualified teachers, and teaching out of field are especially severe in high-poverty schools, where many teachers lack either a college major or minor in their primary field.⁽³⁶⁾ Unfortunately, new teachers with the least amount of training are most likely to be placed with the most disadvantaged students. If all students, particularly our nation's most disadvantaged students, are to reach high standards, states and districts must develop strategies for making sure that good teachers stay and are supported in needy schools.

Use research-based practices

One of the challenges teachers face is how to effectively teach those children who fail to respond to traditional teaching methods and fall behind. Research provides a great deal of guidance to educators and policymakers about promising strategies for helping all students achieve at high levels, such as innovative ways of grouping students, cooperative learning, keeping teachers together with students for more than one year (looping), tutoring, and reducing class sizes.

The Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration program helps schools fund a number of reform models that combine numerous strategies from what we know about good practice into a comprehensive educational program. For example, more than 1,100 schools across the nation are using Success for All, a program of reorganized reading instruction, to help all students meet challenging standards. The program provides for at least 90 minutes of daily reading instruction in classes grouped according to performance. One of the key elements is continual assessment of student progress. Schools implementing the program assess student performance at least once every eight weeks. The frequent assessments allow teachers to develop instructional plans for students with special needs and to move students into and out of groups as they make progress. Success for All draws on all school staff to help students learn to read. In addition to a structured reading curriculum, Success for All offers one-on-one reading tutors and a preschool and kindergarten component to start early in preparing children to read.

To help low-performing children learn, many schools around the country have introduced innovative grouping practices. If teachers are skilled in using them, these flexible grouping strategies can help improve student academic achievement.

The various grouping strategies detailed in this guide, however, differ greatly from the most commonly known ability-grouping practice, known as tracking. Tracking locks students into groups, often over the entire period of their education. Tracking is antithetical to the belief that all children can learn and reach high standards. Furthermore, research shows that tracking policies disproportionately group together African American and Hispanic students, who are far more likely than their peers to be improperly judged to have learning deficits and limited potential.⁽³⁷⁾

If implemented properly, changes in student grouping practices can benefit at-risk students. But the practice requires a common curriculum and standards that all students are expected to meet, extraordinary professional development, and diligent, regular assessment of student progress and needs. Without this support structure, these practices can easily fall into a system of tracking.

Multi age grouping. Multi age grouping is a strategy that can help counter the growing numbers of young children who are retained or socially promoted in the early grades. This practice mixes children of different ages and grade levels in the same classroom. In a Multi age classroom, teachers focus more on individual student progress rather than grade-level expectations. Furthermore, because Multi age classrooms often emphasize project-based curricula, cooperation, and the sharing of knowledge, the strategy has been known to improve student performance.

Within-class ability grouping. Within-class ability grouping is an approach by which students are divided into two to three ability-based groups within a class. Research has demonstrated that this grouping practice is especially useful for those students who have fallen behind in reading and math. Unlike tracking, where students rarely move from level to level, within-class ability grouping employs smaller groups within a classroom and emphasizes movement across levels as students make progress. Within-class ability grouping must also employ frequent assessment of students to enable them to move easily to the next level when they are ready.

Looping. Looping is the practice of having a teacher stay with a group of students for more than one year. This approach cuts down on the annual back-to-school time spent on learning names, going over classroom procedures, and assessing the needs and skill levels of new students.

Looping allows teachers the opportunity to build lasting and supportive relationships with students as they move with their class from year to year. Because looping permits teachers to assess students over longer blocks of time, during which children have a chance to catch up or develop further skills, looping can reduce the incidence of retention and social promotion.

Cooperative learning. Cooperative learning is another grouping practice that has been linked to higher student achievement. Cooperative learning occurs when small groups of students with varying levels of ability cooperate on projects within a class. It is a learning strategy that can be used in either the Multi age or the single-age classroom. Together the children do coursework and share the responsibility for failing or succeeding at the task.

Cooperative learning is a favored model for managing heterogeneity in a classroom with a wide range of basic academic skills. Experts promote its use as a promising practice for all students because it encourages interaction among students of diverse backgrounds and abilities. In addition, considerable research indicates that cooperative learning particularly benefits low-achievers, the students most prone to retention or social promotion.

Tutoring. Tutoring is a successful alternative to and support for teaching in a large group setting, particularly for students who have trouble learning basic skills. Because tutoring is individualized, it can adapt to a child's pace, learning style, and level of comprehension. It also serves to motivate students who have fallen behind academically. Tutoring can ensure that children do not fall behind in the early grades, as well as give students who are struggling the tools to move ahead.

Tutoring programs are an opportunity for community members and businesses to get involved in helping all children reach high standards. Tutoring also offers opportunities for students to support one another. For example, the Coca-Cola Valued Youth Program, a cross-age tutoring program, targets secondary school students at risk of dropping out and pairs them with elementary school students in a tutoring experience designed to build responsibility, increase self-confidence, and promote bonding with peers and younger children. Research indicates that such targeted intervention can improve the academic achievement of both students. Children often have an advantage over adults in teaching one another because children may more easily understand and relate to other students' problems. One study of third and sixth graders found that student tutors were better than experienced teachers at gauging from nonverbal behavior whether their classmates understood the lessons being taught. Also, student tutors often seem to be particularly capable of presenting subject matter in terms that fellow students can comprehend. Through the interaction between students, peer tutoring has the effect of encouraging the modeling of study skills and work habits. Research on student tutoring also has indicated that a student at risk of school failure is more likely to relate to a student who is of the same age and ethnic or social background than to an adult.

Although tutoring is a promising strategy to provide targeted assistance to children at risk of retention in grade or social promotion, it needs to be carefully implemented if the desired outcomes are to be achieved. To be effective, tutors must be trained in content and proper tutorial and communications skills. Furthermore, tutors need the supervision and support of teachers and administrators so that their work and the students' progress are closely monitored. The support of the entire school staff is necessary for a successful tutoring program.

Reduce class size

President Clinton sponsored legislation in 1998 that will help to reduce class size nationally to an average of 18 students per class in the early elementary grades. In 1999 the U.S. Department of Education will distribute $1.2 billion to states and districts to recruit, hire, and train regular and special education teachers; to test new teachers for academic content knowledge; and to provide professional development activities to teachers.

Reducing class size is a powerful tool that schools can use to help children who are failing to perform at grade level, particularly disadvantaged students. Research has documented that smaller classes with fewer than 20 children can boost academic achievement among students. A recent initiative in Burke County, North Carolina, that was aimed at reducing class size showed that teachers in small classes were able to spend significantly more of their time on teaching than on disciplinary action or organizational matters, in comparison with teachers in large or regular-size classes.

Reducing class size can be an important component of any effort to reduce the incidence of social promotion or retention, yet school leaders should consider the following factors when deciding to institute smaller classes:

• Smaller class size works especially well in the primary grades and with disadvantaged and minority students. The clearest evidence of the positive effects of smaller class sizes has been demonstrated in the early grades. Research on class size effects in Tennessee, Indiana, Wisconsin, and North Carolina show clear academic gains for students in smaller classes through the third grade.

• Professional development is key to the success of smaller classes. There is little doubt that reducing class size can help teachers do a better job at helping children who are falling behind. But teachers must be prepared with the necessary tools and learning strategies to take advantage of smaller teacher-pupil ratios. Professional development activities must be tailored to meet the needs of teachers in smaller classes. When teachers are trained to teach a small class, they report that they have a better attitude toward students and can better individualize instruction practices.

• Smaller class sizes must be accompanied by other strategies to eliminate social promotion. Introducing smaller classes in a school is not a cure-all. Instead, to improve achievement it is necessary to implement targeted reductions in class size along with other strategies described in this guide.

Accommodate students with special needs

In implementing strategies to help all students reach high standards, districts and schools must address the needs of students who face special challenges. Students for whom English is not their first language, migrant students, and students with disabilities are often at particular risk of falling behind their peers academically.

Students with limited proficiency in English (LEP). Any discussion of efforts to help all children reach high standards of learning must consider ways of effectively educating the large and growing number of students with limited English-language skills in schools across the nation. Over the past 20 years, the percentage of Hispanic students in U.S. public schools has more than doubled. According to recent estimates, there are more than 3.1 million LEP students in the United States.⁽³⁸⁾ These students have much higher rates of poverty, a greater tendency to drop out of school, and much less access to early childhood services than their non-minority and English-speaking peers.

Students with limited English-language skills can benefit from transitional programs. Transitional programs provide instruction in the English language as well as in the native language of students who have been in the country for a short period of time. Such programs assess the needs of students while helping them adjust to their new surroundings. Newcomer High School in San Francisco, founded in 1979, was the first program of its kind in the country. In 1998, Newcomer High School served 369 students in grades 9-11. Ninety-eight percent of students are eligible to receive free or reduced-price lunches. About 50 percent of students are Chinese, 27 percent are Hispanic, 9 percent are Russian, and 4 percent are Filipino. Students usually spend one year at the school before transferring to another district high school; they study English as well as their primary language and take bilingual or sheltered English classes in core content areas. Teachers team up to align the school's curriculum with district standards. The school also links students and their families with needed social, medical, and mental health services.

In addition to being offered special transitional and other programs to meet their needs, students with limited English proficiency also must be encouraged to take the same challenging coursework as their peers. Recent studies show that many students, particularly Hispanic, African American, and disadvantaged youth, do not now take challenging courses such as algebra and geometry in school, even though students who study algebra in middle school and plan to take advanced math and science courses in high school are more likely to go to college. The College Board's EQUITY 2000 project, for example, helps districts with a high proportion of minority and disadvantaged students to phase out lower-level mathematics in favor of a college preparatory curriculum. It does so through heightening teachers' expectations for their students, encouraging students to take more rigorous courses, and engaging families in the learning process.

Migrant students. The more than 600,000 migrant students in the United States also face problems related to social promotion and retention. Because these students are mobile, maintaining educational continuity must be at the forefront of intervention strategies. The Migrant Education Program (MEP) statute offers considerable flexibility to states to design and implement services that help migrant children meet challenging standards. For example, education services available before and after school help migrant youth who must work during the school year. Some states and districts have adopted a home-based service delivery model, especially when trying to reach preschool migrant children and to enhance parenting skills within a family unit. Districts and schools can provide services at hours and locations that may entice older migrant children who no longer attend school to return. A number of states provide intensive education services to migrant students through short residential programs in the summer or during vacation periods. Distance learning, correspondence courses, and coordinated instruction across school sites are strategies that also address the needs of highly mobile students.

Students with Disabilities. Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), states must ensure that a free appropriate public education is made available to all children with disabilities, beginning at age three and extending through high school graduation or a student's 22nd birthday, depending on state law or practice. The IDEA requires that each disabled child must receive a program of instruction and services in conformity with an Individualized Education Program (IEP) developed by a team composed of the child's parents, school personnel, and other required participants.

All disabled children must be educated in the least restrictive environment appropriate to their individual needs. This means that children with disabilities must be educated, to the maximum extent appropriate, in regular classes with their age appropriate, nondisabled peers, with appropriate supplementary aids and services, in the school they would attend if not disabled. In order to ensure that each child's IEP appropriately addresses the child's unique special educational needs, the IEP team must regularly review each student's progress toward attaining the annual goals and determine whether any additional accommodations or modifications are needed. This is to ensure that the student's disability-related needs are addressed and that the student continues to be involved in and progresses in the general curriculum. Under Federal civil rights laws, which prohibit discrimination on the basis of disability, it would be impermissible for school officials to make decisions about social promotion and grade retention solely on the basis of the category of the student's disability.

38. U.S. Department of Education, 1998.
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