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Policy Framework
Elementary schools that educate children at risk of academic failure have traditionally responded by offering remedial instruction that slows the pace of learning. Research suggests, however, that remediation makes it harder for students to catch up and join the educational mainstream. Accelerated Schools offer a different approach: accelerating learning for all students. Accelerated Schools use a systematic school restructuring process that aims to transform the school environment into one that provides students with rich, relevant educational experiences that stimulate their motivation and desire to learn and grow.
With over 1,000 schools subscribing to the model, the Accelerated Schools movement is one of the most widely established and fastest-growing school reform efforts designed to improve the educational achievement of poor and minority students. MDRC’s evaluation of Accelerated Schools, completed in 2001, measured the reform’s effects on student achievement.
Agenda, Scope, and Goals
The goals of the Accelerated Schools study were both substantive and methodological:
- to estimate the effects of Accelerated Schools on student achievement in elementary schools that had implemented the reform’s key features.
- to develop better methods for assessing the effects of school-based reforms, such as Accelerated Schools, which often cannot be studied using random assignment research designs.
Design, Sites, and Data Sources
Each of the eight elementary schools selected for the study had a high proportion of at-risk students, had implemented the main components of the Accelerated Schools reform by the early 1990s, had not instituted other major reforms over the eight-year study period, and were able to supply the data needed for the analysis. These schools were located in Santa Rosa, California; Waimanola, Hawaii; Aurora, Illinois; St. Louis, Missouri; St. James, Missouri; New York City, New York; and Charleston and Spartanburg, South Carolina.
MDRC’s Accelerated Schools study pioneered the use of an innovative methodology for measuring program impacts when random assignment is not feasible. At the core of the study was an interrupted time series analysis of the reading and math test scores of successive cohorts of third-graders in eight Accelerated Schools. In the analysis, the scores of third-graders who attended the schools during the three years before the reform was launched were used to predict what these scores would have looked like over the next five years had the reform not been put in place. Effects on achievement were obtained by comparing the predicted test scores with the scores that were registered. MDRC has since refined this design and applied it in other evaluations of school-based reforms.
Findings
The findings on Accelerated Schools are available in the 2001 report, Evaluating the Accelerated Schools Approach: A Look at Early Implementation and Impacts on Student Achievement in Eight Elementary Schools by Howard S. Bloom, JoAnn Rock, Sandra Ham, Laura Melton, and Julieanne O'Brien.
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