A Look at Early Implementation and Impacts on Student Achievement in Eight Elementary Schools
2001. Howard S. Bloom, Sandra Ham, Laura Melton, Julieanne O'Brien.
Elementary schools charged with educating children at risk of academic failure have long faced a dilemma. The traditional approach to teaching at-risk students has been to offer remedial instruction that slows down the pace of learning, but research suggests that remediation makes it harder for students to join the educational mainstream. The solution offered by the Accelerated Schools approach — a "whole-school" reform now being implemented in more than 1,000 elementary and middle schools — is to "accelerate" the learning of all children. This report from MDRC's study of the reform in eight elementary schools finds that it significantly increased student achievement once the schools turned to making changes in curriculum and instruction. The results are based on an innovative analysis of third-graders' test scores in reading and math over an eight-year period.
