| A key challenge faced by elementary schools
is finding effective ways to help all students develop the
skills needed to succeed in later education and the labor
market. Remedial education programs have been a traditional
response to academic problems, especially among poor and minority
students, but past research has shown that this approach can
keep students from joining the educational mainstream. The
Accelerated Schools approach charts a different course, seeking
to “accelerate” rather than slow down the learning
of children at risk of school failure.
Developed by Dr. Henry M. Levin and his
colleagues at the Accelerated Schools Project (ASP), the Accelerated
Schools model is now being used in more than 1,000 elementary
and middle schools. Accelerated Schools seek to (1) create
a new, supportive school culture that sets high expectations
for teachers and students; (2) institute a governance structure
characterized by broad staff participation in decision making
and by procedures for taking stock of the school’s strengths
and problems and for generating solutions; and (3) introduce
a “powerful learning” approach to curriculum and
instruction that is more challenging, interactive, project-based,
and relevant for students than traditional approaches.
At ASP’s invitation and with funding from
the Ford Foundation, MDRC conducted an independent evaluation
of the Accelerated Schools reform in eight elementary schools
around the country. The schools selected by the research team
served a high proportion of at-risk students, had implemented
the early version of the reform’s main components by the early
1990s, did not institute other major reforms during the study
period, and were able to supply the requisite data. In the
study’s “interrupted time series” design, the schools’
third-grade test scores in reading and math during the three
years before the reform was launched were used to predict
what the third-grade test scores would have been without the
reform during each of the five following years. To estimate
impacts on student achievement, the predicted test scores
were then compared with the actual scores. The study focused
on successive cohorts of third-graders because this grade
marks a critical point in the development of basic reading
and math skills.
Among the study’s key findings:
- During the first three years of implementation,
the schools focused on reforming school governance and culture, turning
to curriculum and instruction only in the third or fourth year.
- The reform’s impacts on third-grade test scores
tracked schools’ implementation of it. There were no positive impacts
in the first two years, a slight decline in the third year — as schools
began to modify their curriculum and instruction — and a gradual increase
in the fourth and fifth years. The average third-grade reading and math
scores in the fifth year exceeded the predicted levels by a statistically
significant amount.
- These impacts were not uniform across all students
or all schools. The largest impacts were observed among students who
would have scored in the middle of their school's test score distribution
without the reform and among the schools that had the lowest test scores
before launching the reform.
These results should be interpreted with
caution for several reasons: They are based on a sample of
only eight schools, the positive impacts took four to five
years to emerge, and it is not known whether the impacts will
persist in later grades. Nevertheless, these findings show
that the Accelerated Schools approach improved academic achievement
in a group of mostly at-risk students.
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