| |
The
Success for All Foundation (SFAF) is a nonprofit organization
dedicated to the development, evaluation, and dissemination
of proven reform models for preschool, elementary, and
middle schools, especially those serving many children
placed at risk. SFAF has continued work begun in 1987
at Johns Hopkins University and still retains strong
links to Johns Hopkins. As of 2009, the Success for
All Foundation is serving about 1,500 schools in 46
states, as well as assisting related projects in five
other countries. Programs in elementary reading, writing,
math, preschool, and middle school are in circulation.
In addition, SFA-Reading First and Early Reading First
programs are available.
 |
SFA Building, Towson MD |
The Success for All Foundation
is headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland. It has an annual
budget of about $50 million, most of which is derived
from fees from schools for training and materials, supplemented
by grants and loans from charitable foundations and
government agencies.
The goal of the Success for
All Foundation is to transform schools by creating and
disseminating programs that are both based on research
and that have themselves been researched in rigorous
evaluations. In addition to its direct services to schools,
SFAF promotes broader policies favoring school reform
through adoption and effective implementation of proven
programs.
Success for All started in its
first school in 1987, but its history really begins
much earlier.
Bob Slavin and Nancy Madden
first met in the 1970s as students at Reed College in
Oregon, and quickly realized that they shared a passion
for improving education. They spent hours walking in
the rain, talking about how to make sure that all children
got the education they deserved – especially children
from disadvantaged circumstances. Both were studying
psychology, and they quickly became fans of experimental
research. They moved back to Maryland, Bob’s home
state, to continue their studies and to put their ideas
into action.
Success for All grew out of
a program of research and development starting with
basic research on cooperative learning strategies. By
1980, Bob and Nancy’s group at Johns Hopkins University
had learned how to harness the power of kids working
with kids by structuring methods in which groups could
succeed only if all of their members had mastered the
academic material they were studying.
 Up
to that point, our methods only dealt with instructional
processes, not curriculum. They were popular and effective,
but we felt that well-structured cooperative learning
would never be a fundamental part of daily instruction
until it was embedded in curriculum. Beginning in 1980,
we developed a complete math program, TAI, which combined
cooperative learning with individualized instruction.
In 1983, we developed Cooperative Integrated Reading
and Composition, or CIRC. Research on both TAI and CIRC
found strong positive effects on achievement; but even
more, our experience with these programs taught us how
integrating process and curriculum could make cooperative
learning and other effective practices the basis for
reform in these basic subjects. However, we were still
working classroom by classroom and began to see the
need to involve entire schools in the reform process,
to deal with issues that individual teachers could not
confront alone. In 1985, we began work on the cooperative
elementary school, a model that combined TAI and CIRC
with school organization changes, assertive efforts
to integrate special education students, and family
support programs. Again, the results were very positive,
and the experience taught us how working with whole
schools could enhance professional development, implementation
quality, and outcomes for all children. At about the
same time, we wrote a book (with Nancy Karweit), Effective
Programs for Students at Risk, that reviewed research
on a wide variety of approaches that had been effective
with disadvantaged, minority, and academically handicapped
students.
In 1986 we had a visit from
Kalman "Buzzy" Hettleman, a former Maryland
Secretary of Human Resources, who engaged us in a series
of discussions on the question of what we'd do if we
had total freedom to restructure an inner-city elementary
school, if our objective was to make certain that every
child would be successful. In early spring of 1987,
Hettleman announced to us that he'd gotten enthusiastic
approval from the then-superintendent and school board
president in Baltimore to actually do what we'd been
talking about. We set to work right away. Nancy, with
Barbara Livermon of Notre Dame College, designed the
first version of what has become Reading Roots, and
a tutoring component to go along with it. Nancy Karweit
designed preschool and kindergarten programs. By September
of 1987, we had finished the prototype, selected a pilot
school (Abbottston Elementary), trained the teachers,
and started implementation.
From the start, it was clear
that we had a winner. Children at Abbottston surged
forward in their reading and writing, and early evaluations
confirmed what everyone involved could see. In 1988
we added four more schools in Baltimore and one in Philadelphia,
and these started off with great success as well.
Then things changed. A new mayor
brought in a new superintendent. This led to a long
series of political problems. Funding for our pilot
schools was withdrawn, supportive principals were replaced
by principals with new agendas, and one by one, schools
dropped out. However, our difficulties in Baltimore
might have been a blessing in disguise. We had established
a strong research base in those early pilots and then
moved quickly to establish and evaluate pilots in other
places.
By the early 1990s, we were
developing our research base and roughly doubling the
number of schools we served each year. In 1992, another
crucial event took place: we received funding from the
New American Schools Development Corporation (now New
American Schools, or NAS) to develop Roots & Wings.
The main purpose of this funding was to add MathWings
and WorldLab to Success for All, but it also enabled
us to greatly improve all of our existing programs and
professionalize our dissemination.
 Throughout
the 1990s, we were adding about 60% more schools each
year, which means quadrupling every three years. Our
growing staff of trainers kept new and old schools growing
and developing, and kept adapting to necessary changes
as we added schools. Research that we were doing at
Johns Hopkins continued to show strong positive effects
of SFA on reading and writing achievement, and other
researchers elsewhere, especially Steve Ross and Lana
Smith at the University of Memphis, began to evaluate
SFA and to confirm our own findings.
Also in the mid 1990s, we began
to work in other countries, first in Canada and later
in England and Mexico, and in adapted forms in Israel
and Australia. Studies by researchers in Canada, England,
Israel, and Australia compared their adaptations of
SFA to matched control schools and, once again, found
the kinds of effects on student reading achievement
that we had found in the U.S. Further, we began to get
evidence, from our own research and from research at
what was then Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) in
Los Angeles, that the bilingual and ESL adaptations
of SFA were producing positive effects on Spanish and
English reading measures.
Our focus is still
on developing and disseminating high-quality programs,
now for children from pre-kindergarten to 9th grade,
and on dealing with the problems inherent in maintaining
quality and effectiveness in a rapidly growing organization.
However, new developments are making our work even more
visible and influential. Success for All was named as
an example in the 1997 legislation that first established
Comprehensive School Reform. More recently, the latest
guidance places a stronger emphasis on adoption of programs
"based on scientifically-based research,"
which is defined as programs that have been extensively
evaluated in rigorous experimental-control comparisons,
have been published in scientific journals, and have
been studied by many investigators. Research on Success
for All meets this definition better than any other
comprehensive reform model. Furthermore, we now offer
SFA-Reading First and Early Reading First, specifically
tailored to meet the needs of the No Child Left Behind
Act.
Success for All is not magic,
our own research and that of others has demonstrated
time and again that achievement outcomes are closely
related to quality of implementation. Success for All
does not work for every child in every school. However,
the story of Success for All is one of relentless efforts
by a remarkable group of developers, researchers, trainers,
teachers, school leaders, and communities to put proven
programs into every school willing to undergo extensive
reform. We have not yet achieved success for all, but
with every passing year we move closer and closer to
that goal!
Back To Top
|
