School Reform & Beyond (SRB): Executive Summary
To improve academic outcomes of all children, rigorous school reforms must be leveraged strategically to become more effective. For children from low-income households, families of color, or with English language challenges of recent immigration, school reform by itself is insufficient. To shatter an apparent "glass ceiling" that limits even strong efforts by teachers and schools to reach proficiency standards (such as those prescribed by No Child Left Behind), three integrated and synergistic strategies will be needed that leverage effective school reforms by:
- Maximizing the start to schooling (pre-K to Grade 5, ages 4 through 10), building upon best evidence-based strategies of achieving cognitive/academic proficiency, with evidence-based improvements in social and emotional development and self-regulated learning of young students; and
- Elevating school readiness, incentivizing and enabling key family and parental capacities to prepare their children from infancy (ages 0 to 3) for successful school entry at pre-K; and also
- Optimizing non-educational, non-instructional contexts--e.g., safe living environments, integrated services and delivery systems, welfare policies, heath-care practices--that demonstrate the greatest synergistic impacts on learning and development from birth onward.
SRB will pilot test and then take to national scale (through randomized trials) the most interactive, sustainable, and efficient combination of interventions, drawn selectively from all three integrated strategies, which (a) accelerates the growth of school readiness and of academic proficiency beyond current practices; and (b) optimizes an accelerating growth trajectory throughout elementary school as successful preparation for middle school. In selecting, testing and implementing its strategically targeted interventions, SRB works collaboratively with academic experts; early childhood education and child care organizations; teachers and chief educational administrators in local school districts; mayors and county executives; members of school boards and unions; governors; and with stakeholder organizations who represent them, and children, nationally.
Through a series of developmental and pilot projects, the first strategic intervention--to maximize the start to schooling--will be refined and tested for fidelity and efficacy beginning in 2009. The strategy combines the best evidence-based platform of early whole school reform to achieve literacy, Success for All, with a research-based approach to social-emotional learning (SEL) and executive functioning (EF) that supports academic achievement. The combined intervention into literacy and SEL/EF will be implemented as an integrated curriculum with sustained programs of workforce development and teacher support across grades within schools and across schools within a system. The intervention is being developed initially through two phased but aligned pilot studies, one focusing upon state-funded Pre-K into Grade 1 and another focusing upon K through Grade 4. This initial roll-out and testing of the first intervention will occur in cooperation and close partnership with the school systems in Atlanta, Georgia and Lawrence, Massachusetts.
The remaining two interventions, seeking to elevate school readiness and to optimize non-educational, non-instructional contexts that interact with the whole school reform of the first intervention strategy, remain in early development. However, the entirety of the SRB intervention approach will ultimately deploy all three intervention strategies, aiming to accelerate the trajectory of academic achievement of all children but especially of the most challenged, from birth through age 10.
SRB is a project developed by the Center for Advancing Research and Solutions for Society (CARSS) at the University of Michigan. CARSS serves as SRB's administrative headquarters, and SRB's various developmental and intervention research activities are distributed among three collaborating research hubs, including New York University, Harvard and the University of Michigan.
School Reform & Beyond: Events
A series of stock-taking meetings and design conferences have been held. This work is helping to shape an intervention which will be designed to test, and hopefully demonstrate, the interactive and synergistic effects of an educational program that combines the best curricular reforms with state of the art social-emotional learning, plus efforts that elevate school readiness, plus programs which optimize the impact of non-school contexts which have an impact on educational outcomes.
See the links below for the full proceedings of the two design conferences.
Pre-K Design Conference: December 13-14, 2007
The following files are Windows Media video files.
- Welcome/Orientation — David Featherman; Structure and Goals — Daniel Keating, Deborah Phillips, and Cybele Raver
- Integrating Literacy and Numeracy Part I — Deborah Phillips, Sharon Griffin, and John Fantuzzo
- Integrating Literacy and Numeracy Part II — Fred Morrison
- Bringing in Self-Regulation and Socio-Emotional Learning — Cybele Raver, Stephanie Jones, Karen Bierman, Mark Greenberg, and Deborah Stipek
- Clinical, Classroom, and Community-Focused Approaches to Intervention — Deborah Phillips, John Lochman, Deborah Gorman-Smith, Patrick Tolan, Sam Odom, and Susan Sheridan
- Critical Issues for Design and Implementation — Cybele Raver, Pamela Morris, Tony Raden, and Hiro Yoshikawa
- Lessons for Moving Forward — Dan Keating, Kimber Bogard, Joan Lombardi, Barbara Goodson, James Griffin, and Ken Burnley
K-3 Design Conference: July 16-17, 2007
The following files are Windows Media video files.
Report to the Spencer Foundation: August 15, 2006
After consulting with scholars and educational practitioners in a series of stock-taking meetings and discussions during 2005 and 2006, a promising set of synergistic strategies for maximizing educational outcomes for America's children were identified. These are detailed in the report submitted to the Spencer Foundation.
|
