Where There's a Way, There's a Will:
An Interview With Robert Slavin

By Dennis Sparks

Journal of Staff Development, Spring 1998 (Vol. 19., No. 2)

(Editor's Note: Robert Slavin is co-director of the Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk at Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore, Md. A longer bio appears at the end of this article.)

JSD: You are a strong advocate for creating schools in which all children, no matter what their socioeconomic status or race, learn at high levels. Is it really possible to create such schools?
Slavin: I think that it's fundamentally possible, but it's not going to be cheap. My reason for believing that comes from putting together bits of evidence from different sources. For instance, if we could imagine all students having early childhood experiences as intensive as the University of North Carolina's Abecedarian Project, a program designed to determine what could be achieved if you took very impoverished parents and kids and provided them with good quality services from infancy. The program has produced quite remarkable effects that have persisted to high school.
Programs like the North Carolina one, however, must be followed up with high quality school-based programs like Success for All. These programs provide high quality instruction for kids from pre-kindergarten through sixth grade, tutoring for kids who are struggling in first grade, high-quality family support systems to involve parents and resolve non academic difficulties that kids might have, and a great deal of staff development for teachers. This staff development must allow teachers to assess the outcomes they're getting from kids and the quality of their own teaching. It must also make it possible for them to assist one another in a variety of ways. With this type of education, you would expect to have sixth graders who are in mighty good shape.

JSD: Is it really possible for all students attain the same high standards?
Slavin: No one is proposing that there be a cap on student achievement. But I think there should be a floor, and that the floor should be a high one such as the basic level on NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress). I think that's attainable, perhaps not by 100 percent of the kids but by 98 or 99 percent. Currently, only 60 percent of our students are achieving at that level.
In addition, there would be a spin-off effect in which the kids who are achieving well would be achieving a lot better. The at-risk students would catch up with today's advantaged kids, but the advantaged kids would also be moving up.

Reading is fundamental
JSD: Your work has stressed the importance of reading in the early grades.
Slavin: Reading is fundamental. Ninety to 100 percent of the problems with students' achievement can be traced to reading. Solving the reading problem wouldn't take care of everything, but it would go an awful long way to doing so.
JSD: Do we know enough about teaching reading to ensure success in that area for all students?
Slavin: We know enough to do much better than we're doing now, but there's still more we need to know. We need to use a dual strategy of using what we already know on a much broader scale and exploring the remaining questions, of which there are many.
It's shocking to me how little investment there's been in identifying effective reading strategies. Much more has been spent on understanding learning or reading disabilities, but remarkably little about how you teach reading to kids in general or to those having mild or severe difficulties. There's a vast amount of research yet to be done to refine what we now know and to reach kids with whom we are unsuccessful.
JSD: What do we know with some confidence about teaching reading?
Slavin: We understand the prerequisites for beginning reading, such as phonemic awareness, concepts of print, background knowledge of how the world works, and general alphabet knowledge. In first grade, we have a good sense of the importance of teaching a systematic approach to word attackÐmeaning phonicsÐin the context of meaningful and interesting text.
There has to be a balance between teaching phonics and teaching meaning. More research is needed, though, to determine exactly what that balance should be. There's research that supports grouping kids across grade levels and classrooms so that we have classes of different ages but with just one reading level. That works better than the three reading groups model. There's also research on general instructional strategies that supports the value of a rapid pace, of accommodating different learning styles, and of teaching the same concepts using a variety of strategies.
All of this obviously requires a substantial investment in staff development. Knowing what a good first grade classroom should look like and mailing a description of it to all teachers obviously isn't enough. There needs to be a substantial retooling of an entire workforce because the quality of early reading instruction is really terrible, even by very good teachers who are caring and hard working. The structures and the strategies and the materials they're using are just not what they should be.
Teachers need to understand the concept of what they should be doing and the procedures to use. But, equally important is follow-up. Someone has to give teachers feedback. Teachers also need opportunities to discuss with each other what they're doing and to visit one another's classrooms. Changing behavior requires trying our new practices, getting feedback, trying again, getting more feedback, and so on. That's how you learn anything.

Reading tutors
JSD: Let's return to reading for a moment. I am one of those who volunteered in a local school to help students learn to read even before President Clinton's call for such help. I would be the first to admit, however, that I really don't know what I'm doing. My experience has taught me that while volunteers are important, something more is needed.
Slavin: It's infuriating to me that the President of the United States says that every child will learn how to read by the third grade and then proposes as the only strategy the use of volunteer tutors who are generally not being adequately trained or supervised and who don't have adequate materials. In proposing this strategy, no one seems to even have looked at the research. I have a colleague who examined the research on volunteer tutoring. She found only a couple of effective models. They provided amounts of professional development and supervision that are light years ahead of what tutors in America Reads are now being provided. (Editor's note: See "Volunteer Tutoring Programs: Do We Know What Works?," by Barbara A Wasik in Phi Delta Kappan, December 1997.)
America Reads is a feel good program to raise the status of reading and to get people into the schools who can bond with little kids, but in terms of it helping every kid learning to read by third grade, get real! It may be beneficial with kids who are nearly reading, but it's just not going to make a real difference. I heard of a program in Baltimore where a volunteer asked what to do if the child couldn't read, and the person was told to just do his best. That's not going to get us there. I like the concept of tutoring and have nothing against it as a strategy if we recognize its limitations and that it's not a substitute for serious thinking about the problem.

Schoolwide reforms
JSD: There are over 100,000 schools in the United States that are each being asked to invent their own ways of producing high levels of learning for all students. Is that an effective way to address the issues of school reform?
Slavin: There's a paradigm shift occurring in this area. We've had this idea that every school has to invent its own path to reform, that whatever has been developed elsewhere is not going to work in a given school. This has been shown to be wrong many times and yet it continues to be widely believed. For some reason, people think that it is insulting and deprofessionalizing to teachers to have a well structured model to use. I think that's beginning to change as a larger set of replicable models have been developed from which schools can choose.
It's been our experience that once you get past the university people and those in central offices and actually get to teachers, they're extremely happy to have things that are well structured and laid out. They understand full well that that's what is required to make a difference for their kids. Teachers want tools.

Models of success
JSD: What are some examples of those models?
Slavin: Our own Success for All and Roots and Wings programs are two. The New American Schools programs  have helped change people's thinking about this to some degree. We're recognizing that we don't have to reinvent the wheel.
The federal government, unfortunately, has not invested in the kind of research and development that leads to products of this kind. It's astonishing to me that, when you look at the various replicable programs that are in wide use, almost none of them have had much federal funding. Ours is the main exception.
JSD: You've mentioned Success for All. What are its goals and program components?
Slavin: The program's goal is to make certain that kids are successful from the beginning of their time in school. In Success for All, we focus on reading and writing. Roots and Wings, which is our newer program, adds math, science, and social studies. There are three main elements to Success for All. The first has to do with curriculum and instruction. We have identified the best instructional strategies for pre-kindergarten through sixth grade. There is extensive professional development provided for our staff, and a building facilitator helps teachers work on continuously improving the quality of their work.
The second element is one-to-one tutoring provided by certified teachers and well-trained paraprofessionals. They are working primarily with first graders who are just starting to fall behind. Our philosophy is to use the first grade classroom instructional strategies to skim off all the easy problems. We then end up with a small group of kids who despite the very best instruction are still not getting it. We pick up those kids early and provide one-to-one tutoring; most of the time, they will do very well.
The third element of Success for All is family support programs to help parents with non-academic issues such as attendance and behavior problems. Family Support Teams provide a curriculum of social skills and alternatives to violence and help with the integration of social and health services. For instance, they make certain that kids have eye glasses or hearing aids or whatever they need to learn.

Benefits of Success for All
JSD: What evidence do you have for the benefits of Success for All?
Slavin: We have followed 12 districts over a number of years. On average, Success for All kids are reading about three months better than control students by the end of first grade. By the end of fifth grade, they are reading about a year better.
In two recent studies, we found, not surprisingly, a strong correlation between the quality of program implementation and student outcomes. And there's also a strong correlation between student outcomes and the use of all program elements. In other words, schools that think they can do this for cheap are finding out that they can't. Those schools that have a full-time facilitator rather than a half-time facilitator and who have adequate numbers of tutors, for instance, get much better outcomes.

Quality costs
JSD: Costs obviously affect the quality of implementation. How do schools pay for Success for All? Is there a trade-off for schools that want to do it right?
Slavin: Overwhelmingly, the schools we deal with are Title I schools with schoolwide projects. Consequently, the great majority of ongoing expenses are covered by Title I. For example, the personnel costs for Success for All can be paid by the reallocation of Title I staff. Some special education staff are also used within the program as tutors.
The start-up training and materials cost for the first year averages about $65,000. It drops to about $25,000 the second year, and less than that in future years. Those start-up costs are usually paid by Title I funds, but are often provided by special grants as well. Congress has just passed the Porter-Obey Amendment that provides $150 million for grants to schools of up to $50,000 per year for up to three years to pay for the start up costs of adopting whole school designs.

Barriers to implementation
JSD: In addition to costs, what barriers prevent schools from doing a full implementation?
Slavin: An important factor is staff commitment. To address that issue, we require approval by secret ballot of by least 80 percent of staff members before we will work with a school. Sometimes that process hasn't worked, though, because a school was pressured to take the program or because the faculty saw the program as the lesser of two evils.
It has been our experience that if a school has the resources and the willingness there are really very few barriers to successful implementation. It almost always works, even though there's a huge job to be done, because Success for All changes almost everything that happens in the school.

Creating vision
JSD: That brings us to the issue of will. How do we create a will in a school system or faculty to do what has never before been done?
Slavin: I believe that where there's a way there's a will. All teachers went into teaching because they thought they could make a difference in the lives of children. They are out there doing the best they know how, and many of them see kids slip through their fingers every year. But they don't know what else to do.
I believe if teachers are given a clear vision of what is possible they are more than delighted to put in an enormous effort to change their schools. There will always be some resistance. But if the district and the principal scoop up a delegation of scoffers and doubters as well as people interested in the innovation to visit a school using the program, those teachers come back saying, "We could do that." It becomes hard for teachers to justify what they've been doing when they personally observe schools that are doing so much better. So I think it's really a question of vision creation. School districts need to provide information, show videos, and send people out to look at programs that are working.

JSD: Are you optimistic about our capacity to create schools in which all students learn at high levels?
Slavin: I'm tremendously optimistic about the possibilities, but I don't think that we yet have the national will to do what is necessary. Our nation isn't ready to devote its resources to the research and development necessary to create for all children the kinds of schools we've been talking about. However, when you look at schools and districts that are really serious about reform, you see things that give you faith in children and teachers.
 

Bio of Robert Slavin
Job: Co-director of the Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk at Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore, Md.

Education: B.A. in psychology, Reed College, 1972. Ph.D. in social relations, Johns Hopkins Univ., 1975.

Professional history: Slavin is one of the creators of the Success for All program which is being used in more than 300 schools in 70 districts in 24 states, including most of the 50 largest districts in the U.S.
He has written or co-written more than 180 articles and 15 books, including Educational Psychology: Theory into Practice (Allyn & Bacon, 1986, 1988, 1991, 1994); School and Classroom Organization (Erlbaum, 1989), Effective Programs for Students at Risk (Allyn & Bacon, 1989); Cooperative Learning: Theory, Research, and Practice (Allyn & Bacon, 1990, 1995); Preventing Early School Failure (Allyn & Bacon, 1994); Every Child, Every School: Success for All (Corwin, 1996) and Show Me the Evidence: Proven and Promising Programs for America's Schools (Corwin, in press.)

He received the American Educational Research Assn.'s Raymond B. Cattell Early Career Award for Programmatic Research in 1986, the Palmer O. Johnson award for best article in an AERA journal in 1988 and the Charles A. Dana award in 1994.

To continue the conversation with Dr. Slavin, write him at 3003 N. Charles St., Suite 200, Baltimore, MD 21218-3888, phone 410-516-8809, fax 410 516-8890, or e-mail rslavin@inet.ed.gov.