Achieving Audacious Goals in Education: Amundson and the Fram

On a recent trip to Norway, I visited the Fram Museum in Oslo. The Fram was Roald Amundson’s ship, used to transport a small crew to the South Pole in 1911. The museum is built around the Fram itself, and visitors can go aboard this amazing ship, surrounded by information and displays about polar exploration. What was most impressive about the Fram is the meticulous attention to detail in every aspect of the expedition. Amundson had undertaken other trips to the polar seas to prepare for his trip, and had carefully studied the experiences of other polar explorers. The ship’s hull was special built to withstand crushing from the shifting of polar ice. He carried many huskies to pull sleds over the ice, and trained them to work in teams.. Every possible problem was carefully anticipated in light of experience, and exact amounts of food for men and dogs were allocated and stored. Amundson said that forgetting “a single trouser button” could doom the effort. As it unfolded, everything worked as anticipated, and all the men and dogs returned safely after reaching the South Pole.

From At the South Pole by Roald Amundsen, 1913 [Public domain]

The story of Amundson and the Fram is an illustration of how to overcome major obstacles to achieve audacious goals. I’d like to build on it to return to a topic I’ve touched on in two previous blogs. The audacious goal: Overcoming the substantial gap in elementary reading achievement between students who qualify for free lunch and those who do not, between African American and White students, and between Hispanic and non-Hispanic students. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), each of these gaps is about one half of a standard deviation, also known as an effect size of +0.50. This is a very large gap, but it has been overcome in a very small number of intensive programs. These programs were able to increase the achievement of disadvantaged students by an effect size of more than +0.50, but few were able to reproduce these gains under normal circumstances. Our goal is to enable thousands of ordinary schools serving disadvantaged students to achieve such outcomes, at a cost of no more than 5% beyond ordinary per-pupil costs.

Educational Reform and Audacious Goals

Researchers have long been creating and evaluating many different approaches to improving reading achievement. This is necessary in the research and development process to find “what works” and build up from there. However, each individual program or practice has a modest effect on key outcomes, and we rarely combine proven programs to achieve an effect large enough to, for example, overcome the achievement gap. This is not what Amundson, or the Wright Brothers, or the worldwide team that achieved eradication of smallpox did. Instead, they set audacious goals and kept at them systematically, using what works, until they were achieved.

I would argue that we should and could do the same in education. The reading achievement gap is the largest problem of educational practice and policy in the U.S. We need to use everything we know how to do to solve it. This means stating in advance that our goal is to find strategies capable of eliminating reading gaps at scale, and refusing to declare victory until this goal is achieved. We need to establish that the goal can be achieved, by ordinary teachers and principals in ordinary schools serving disadvantaged students.

Tutoring Our Way to the Goal

In a previous blog I proposed that the goal of +0.50 could be reached by providing disadvantaged, low-achieving students tutoring in small groups or, when necessary, one-to-one. As I argued there and elsewhere, there is no reading intervention as effective as tutoring. Recent reviews of research have found that well-qualified teaching assistants using proven methods can achieve outcomes as good as those achieved by certified teachers working as tutors, thereby making tutoring much less expensive and more replicable (Inns et al., 2019). Providing schools with significant numbers of well-trained tutors is one likely means of reaching ES=+0.50 for disadvantaged students. Inns et al. (2019) found an average effect size of +0.38 for tutoring by teaching assistants, but several programs had effect sizes of +0.40 to +0.47. This is not +0.50, but it is within striking distance of the goal. However, each school would need multiple tutors in order to provide high-quality tutoring to most students, to extend the known positive effects of tutoring to the whole school.

Combining Intensive Tutoring With Success for All

Tutoring may be sufficient by itself, but research on tutoring has rarely used tutoring schoolwide, to benefit all students in high-poverty schools. It may be more effective to combine widespread tutoring for students who most need it with other proven strategies designed for the whole school, rather than simply extending a program designed for individuals and small groups. One logical strategy to reach the goal of +0.50 in reading might be to combine intensive tutoring with our Success for All whole-school reform model.

Success for All adds to intensive tutoring in several ways. It provides teachers with professional development on proven reading strategies, as well as cooperative learning and classroom management strategies at all levels. Strengthening core reading instruction reduces the number of children at great risk, and even for students who are receiving tutoring, it provides a setting in which students can apply and extend their skills. For students who do not need tutoring, Success for All provides acceleration. In high-poverty schools, students who are meeting reading standards are likely to still be performing below their potential, and improving instruction for all is likely to help these students excel.

Success for All was created in the late 1980s in an attempt to achieve a goal similar to the +0.50 challenge. In its first major evaluation, a matched study in six high-poverty Baltimore elementary schools, Success for All achieved a schoolwide reading effect size of at least +0.50 schoolwide in grades 1-5 on individually administered reading measures. For students in the lowest 25% of the sample at pretest, the effect size averaged +0.75 (Madden et al., 1993). That experiment provided two to six certified teacher tutors per school, who worked one to one with the lowest-achieving first and second graders. The tutors supplemented a detailed reading program, which used cooperative learning, phonics, proven classroom management methods, parent involvement, frequent assessment, distributed leadership, and other elements (as Success for All still does).

An independent follow-up assessment found that the effect maintained to the eighth grade, and also showed a halving of retentions in grade and a halving of assignments to special education, compared to the control group (Borman & Hewes, 2002). Schools using Success for All since that time have rarely been able to afford so many tutors, instead averaging one or two tutors. Many schools using SFA have not been able to afford even one tutor. Still, across 28 qualifying studies, mostly by third parties, the Success for All effect size has averaged +0.27 (Cheung et al., in press). This is impressive, but it is not +0.50. For the lowest achievers, the mean effect size was +0.62, but again, our goal is +0.50 for all disadvantaged students, not just the lowest achievers.

Over a period of years, could schools using Success for All with five or more teaching assistant tutors reach the +0.50 goal? I’m certain of it. Could we go even further, perhaps creating a similar approach for secondary schools or adding in an emphasis on mathematics? That would be the next frontier.

The Policy Importance of +0.50

If we can routinely achieve an effect size of +0.50 in reading in most Title I schools, this would provide a real challenge for policy makers. Many policy makers argue that money does not make much difference in education, or that housing, employment, and other basic economic improvements are needed before major improvements in the education of disadvantaged students will be possible. But what if it became widely known that outcomes in high-poverty schools could be reliably and substantially improved at a modest cost, compared to the outcomes? Policy makers would hopefully focus on finding ways to provide the resources needed if they could be confident in the outcomes.

As Amundson knew, difficult goals can be attained with meticulous planning and high-quality implementation. Every element of his expedition had been tested extensively in real arctic conditions, and had been found to be effective and practical. We would propose taking a similar path to universal success in reading. Each component of a practical plan to reach an effect size of +0.50 or more must be proven to be effective in schools serving many disadvantaged students. Combining proven approaches, we can add sufficiently to the reading achievement of disadvantaged schools to enable them to perform as well as middle class students do. It just takes an audacious goal and the commitment and resources to accomplish it.

References

Borman, G., & Hewes, G. (2002).  Long-term effects and cost effectiveness of Success for All.  Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 24 (2), 243-266.

Cheung, A., Xie, C., Zhang, T., & Slavin, R. E. (in press). Success for All: A quantitative synthesis of evaluations. Education Research Review.

Inns, A., Lake, C., Pellegrini, M., & Slavin, R. (2019). A synthesis of quantitative research on programs for struggling readers in elementary schools. Available at www.bestevidence.org. Manuscript submitted for publication.

Madden, N. A., Slavin, R. E., Karweit, N. L., Dolan, L., & Wasik, B. (1993). Success for All:  Longitudinal effects of a schoolwide elementary restructuring program. American Educational Reseach Journal, 30, 123-148.

Madden, N. A., & Slavin, R. E. (2017). Evaluations of technology-assisted small-group tutoring for struggling readers. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 1-8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10573569.2016.1255577

This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.

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