Program Profile: Success for All (SFA)

This is a schoolwide, intensive educational intervention to detect and resolve literacy problems for children in mostly high-poverty schools. The program is rated Effective. Students in treatment group schools demonstrated statistically significant higher levels of word identification and passage comprehension, and higher scores on Word Attack (a test that measures phonological awareness), compared with students in control group schools.

An Effective rating implies that implementing the program is likely to result in the intended outcome(s).

This program's rating is based on evidence that includes either 1) one study conducted in multiple sites; or 2) two or three studies, each conducted at a different site. Learn about how we make the multisite determination.

Program Goals/Target Population

Success for All (SFA) is a schoolwide, intensive educational intervention to detect and resolve literacy problems for school children in preschool through sixth grade, mostly in high-poverty schools.

Program Components

The program promotes prevention of learning deficits and early intervention to address any deficiencies that emerge. SFA has somewhat different components, depending on each school’s needs and available resources, but there is a common set of core elements to SFA. These main components include the following:

The schoolwide reading curriculum. The main component of SFA is implementation of the schoolwide, research-based reading curriculum in grades K–6. In kindergarten and first grade the program emphasizes language and comprehension skills, phonics, sound blending, and use of shared stories that students read to each other in pairs. In second through sixth grades, the program emphasizes writing, cooperative learning, partner reading activities, direct instruction in reading comprehension skills, and comprehension strategies such as summarization and clarification built around narrative and expository texts.

Although regular class sizes can vary, for reading classes, students are placed into groups of 15–20 at the same reading level. This means that any reading group may have students at different grade levels (for example, first, second, and third graders) if the students are at the same reading level. Regrouping classes in this way expands the amount of time teachers can spend on instruction and decreases the amount of time students engage in unsupervised activities.

Quarterly assessments and regrouping. Students in grades 1–6 are assessed quarterly to determine whether they are making adequate progress. These assessments are used to regroup students according to reading level, to develop alternative teaching strategies, to provide tutoring, or to better meet students’ needs.

Key Personnel

Reading tutors. Reading tutors are used to promote student success in reading. SFA tutors are specially trained certified teachers and paraprofessionals who work one-on-one with any students who are failing in grades 1–3. Tutorial instruction is closely coordinated with regular classroom instruction and takes place 20 minutes daily.

The Solutions Team. A Solutions Team consists of school staff such as parent liaisons, social workers, counselors, and assistant principals who work in each school to support families and their involvement in their children’s success. The Solutions Team concentrates on parent education, parent involvement, attendance, and student behavior. Teachers and tutors alert the team when students are not making adequate progress so the team can provide additional support.

A program facilitator. A program facilitator works as an onsite coach for teachers to help them implement the reading program, to manage quarterly assessments, to assist the Solutions Team, to oversee the intercommunication among all staff, and to aid all staff in the progress of all students.

Study 1

Borman and colleagues (2007) used a used a cluster-randomized trial to assess the impact of SFA on student achievement. The sample was 41 high-poverty schools in 11 states that were randomized to a treatment or a control condition in two phases. In phase 1, six schools were recruited and randomly assigned to either the treatment or the control condition. The treatment schools implemented the SFA program in grades K–5 during fall 2001.

A second cohort of 35 schools was recruited for phase 2. Eighteen of the phase 2 schools implemented the treatment condition in grades K–2, while the other 17 schools implemented the treatment condition in grades 3–5. Grades K–2 in schools assigned to the grades 3–5 treatment condition served as the controls for the schools assigned to the K–2 treatment condition, and vice versa. Over the course of the study, a total of six schools dropped out of the study (some schools closed owing to insufficient enrollment; one school dropped because of local political problems), reducing the analytical sample to 35 schools (18 in the treatment and 17 in the control). The final analytical sample was composed of 1,085 students in 18 K–2 SFA schools and 1,023 students in the 17 control schools.

All schools were situated in communities with high poverty concentrations, with a few rural exceptions. Seventy-four percent of the students participated in the federal free-lunch program, similar to the 80 percent free-lunch participation rate for the nationwide population of SFA schools. Fifty-seven percent of the sample was African American, compared with 40 percent in all SFA schools. And 11 percent of the sample was Hispanic, compared with 35 percent in all SFA schools. The portion of white students in the sample (29 percent) was similar to the portion in all SFA schools (25 percent). There were no statistical differences between the experimental and control schools in terms of demographics and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary test. Posttests used subtests of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests—Revised (WMTR; Letter Identification, Word Identification, Word Attack, Passage Comprehension). Letter Identification was not administered in the final year of data collection because its content is typically not taught in second grade classrooms. Analyses were conducted using hierarchical linear modeling, with students nested within schools to assess student and school-level effects on the four literacy outcomes. No subgroup analyses were conducted.

The Success for All (SFA) intervention is delivered as a comprehensive program that includes materials, training, professional development and coaching, and a blueprint for implementing the program with fidelity.

Teachers and tutors are certified teachers and paraprofessionals who receive 2 to 3 days of in-service supplemental training. The training for teachers of first through third grades concentrates on the reading program, and a training manual provides general teaching strategies and lesson plans. Tutors receive additional training on tutoring strategies and reading assessment. Throughout the year, additional in-service presentations are made by the facilitators and project staff.

For more information, visit the SFA website: http://www.successforall.org/.

These sources were used in the development of the program profile:

These sources were used in the development of the program profile: