Time Passes. Will You?

When I was in high school, one of my teachers posted a sign on her classroom wall under the clock:

Time passes. Will you?

Students spend a lot of time watching clocks, yearning for the period to be over. Yet educators and researchers often seem to believe that more time is of course beneficial to kids’ learning. Isn’t that obvious?

In a major review of secondary reading programs I am completing with my colleagues Ariane Baye, Cynthia Lake, and Amanda Inns, it turns out that the kids were right. More time, at least in remedial reading, may not be beneficial at all.

Our review identified 60 studies of extraordinary quality- mostly large-scale randomized experiments- evaluating reading programs for students in grades 6 to 12. In most of the studies, students reading 2 to 5 grade levels below expectations were randomly assigned to receive an extra class period of reading instruction every day all year, in some cases for two or three years. Students randomly assigned to the control group continued in classes such as art, music, or study hall. The strategies used in the remedial classes varied widely, including technology approaches, teaching focused on metacognitive skills (e.g., summarization, clarification, graphic organizers), teaching focused on phonics skills that should have been learned in elementary school, and other remedial approaches, all of which provided substantial additional time for reading instruction. It is also important to note that the extra-time classes were generally smaller than ordinary classes, in the range of 12 to 20 students.

In contrast, other studies provided whole class or whole school methods, many of which also focused on metacognitive skills, but none of which provided additional time.

Analyzing across all studies, setting aside five British tutoring studies, there was no effect of additional time in remedial reading. The effect size for the 22 extra-time studies was +0.08, while for 34 whole class/whole school studies, it was slightly higher, ES =+0.10. That’s an awful lot of additional teaching time for no additional learning benefit.

So what did work? Not surprisingly, one-to-one and small-group tutoring (up to one to four) were very effective. These are remedial and do usually provide additional teaching time, but in a much more intensive and personalized way.

Other approaches that showed particular promise simply made better use of existing class time. A program called The Reading Edge involves students in small mixed-ability teams where they are responsible for the reading success of all team members. A technology approach called Achieve3000 showed substantial gains for low-achieving students. A whole-school model called BARR focuses on social-emotional learning, building relationships between teachers and students, and carefully monitoring students’ progress in reading and math. Another model called ERWC prepares 12th graders to succeed on the tests used to determine whether students have to take remedial English at California State Universities.

What characterized these successful approaches? None were presented as remedial. All were exciting and personalized, and not at all like traditional instruction. All gave students social supports from peers and teachers, and reasons to hope that this time, they were going to be successful.

There is no magic to these approaches, and not every study of them found positive outcomes. But there was clearly no advantage of remedial approaches providing extra time.

In fact, according to the data, students would have done just as well to stay in art or music. And if you’d asked the kids, they’d probably agree.

Time is important, but motivation, caring, and personalization are what counts most in secondary reading, and surely in other subjects as well.

Time passes. Kids will pass, too, if we make such good use of our time with them that they won’t even notice the minutes going by.

What the Election Might Mean for Evidence-Based Education

Like everyone else in America, I awoke on Wednesday to a new era. Not only was Donald Trump elected president, but the Republicans retained control of both houses of Congress. This election will surely have a powerful impact on issues that the president-elect and other Republicans campaigned on, but education was hardly discussed. The New York Times summarized Mr. Trump’s education positions in an October 31 article. Mr. Trump has spoken in favor of charters and other school choice plans, incentive pay for teachers, and not much else. A Trump administration will probably appoint a conservative Secretary of Education, and that person would have considerable influence on what happens next.

What might this mean for evidence-based reform in education? Hopefully, the new administration will embrace evidence, as embodied in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). Why? Because the Congress that passed ESSA less than a year ago is more or less the same Congress that was just elected. Significantly, Senators Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Michael Bennet (D-Colorado), and Patty Murray (D-Washington), some of the major champions of evidence in the Senate, were all just re-elected. Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee), a key architect of ESSA, is still in office. In the absence of a major push from the new executive branch, the Congress seems likely to continue its bipartisan support for the ESSA law.

Or so I fervently hope.

Evidence has not been a partisan issue and it will hopefully remain bipartisan. Everyone has an interest in seeing that education dollars are spent wisely to benefit children. The evidence movement has advanced far enough to offer real hope that step-by-step progress can take place in education as increasingly effective methods, materials, and software become available, as a direct outcome of research and development. Evidence-based reform has strengthened through red and blue administrations. It should continue to grow through the new administration.

Or so I fervently hope.

Scaling Up: Penicillin and Education

In 1928, the Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming invented penicillin. As the story goes, he invented penicillin by accident, when he left a petri dish containing bacteria on his desk overnight and the next morning found that it was infected with rod-shaped organisms that had killed the bacteria. Fleming isolated the rods and recognized that if they could kill bacteria, they might be useful in curing many diseases.

Early on it was clear that penicillin had extraordinary possibilities. In World War I, more soldiers and civilians had been killed by bacterial diseases than were killed by bullets. What if these diseases could be cured? Early tests showed very promising effects.

Yet there was a big problem. No one knew how to produce penicillin in quantity. Very small experiments established that penicillin had potential for curing bacterial infections and was not toxic. However, the total world supply at the onset of World War II was about enough for a single adult. The impending need for penicillin was obvious, but it still was not ready for prime time.

American and British scientists finally began to work together to find a way to scale up production of penicillin. Finally, the Merck Company developed a mass production method, and was making billions of units by D-Day.

The key dynamic of the penicillin story has much in common with an essential problem of education reform. The Merck work did not change the structure of penicillin itself, but Merck scientists did a lot of science and experimentation to find strains that were stable and replicable. In education reform, it is equally the case that the development and initial evaluation of a given program may be a very different process from that intended to carry out large-scale evaluations and scaling up of proven programs.

In some cases, different organizations may be necessary to do large scale evaluation and implementation, as was the case with Merck and Fleming, and in other cases the same organization may carry though the development, initial evaluation, large-scale evaluation, and dissemination. Whoever is responsible for the various steps, their requirements are similar.

At small scale, innovators are likely to work in schools nearby, where they can frequently visit schools, see what is going on, hear teachers’ perspectives, and change strategies in course in response to what is going on. At small scale, programs might vary a great deal from class to class or school to school. Homemade measures, opinions, observations, and other informal indicators may be all developers need or want. From a penicillin perspective, this is still the Fleming level.

When a program moves to the next level, it may be working in many schools or distant locations, and the approach must change substantially. This is the Merck stage of development in penicillin terms. Developers must have a very clear idea of what the program is, and then provide student materials, software, professional development, and coaching directed toward helping teachers to enact the program effectively. Rather than being able to adapt a great deal to the desires or ideas of every school or teacher, principals and teachers can be asked to vote on participation, with an understanding that if they decide to participate, they commit to follow the program more or less as designed, with reasonable variations in light of unique characteristics of the school (e.g., urban/rural, presence of English learners, or substantial poverty). Professional development and coaching need to be standardized, with room for appropriate adaptations. Organizations that provide large-scale services need to learn how to manage functions such as finance, human resources, and IT.

As programs grow, they should seek funding for large-scale, randomized evaluations, ideally by third party evaluators.

In order to get to the Merck level in education reform, we must be ready to build robust, flexible, self-sustaining organizations, capable of ensuring positive impacts of educational programs on a broad scale. Funding from government and private foundations are needed along the way, but the organizations ultimately must be able to operate mostly or entirely on revenues from schools, especially Title I or other funds likely to be available in many or most schools.

Over the years, penicillin has saved millions of lives, due to the pioneering work of Fleming and the pragmatic work of Merck. In the same way, we can greatly enhance the learning of millions of children, combining innovative design and planful, practical scale-up.