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October 2007
| Volume 65 | Number 2
Early Intervention at Every Age
Interventions That Work
Marge Scherer
Giving Intervention a Head Start
Deborah Perkins-Gough
During a career spanning five decades, Edward Zigler has combined scholarly research with public service to promote national and state policies that are good for all children. Often called “the father of Head Start,” he served on the planning committee for the program in 1965 and became the first director of the Office of Child Development, which administered the fledgling Head Start program. He has worked in some capacity with every federal administration since then. In this interview, he talks about Head Start's effectiveness in promoting school readiness, which he defines more broadly than cognitive development. He also discusses his views on universal preschool and the urgent need for a child care system in the United States.
Changing the Odds
Susan B. Neuman
Research in the neurobiological, behavioral, and social sciences has dramatically increased our capacity to provide effective intervention for economically disadvantaged children. According to Neuman, however, U.S. policymakers have made little use of this body of research to improve the prospects of children at risk. This article discusses seven essential conditions for effective early interventions: targeting services to the most vulnerable children; providing intervention at the right developmental time; providing intensive (regular, frequent, and focused) services; having a highly qualified staff; providing coordinated, comprehensive support including health screening and family education; providing compensatory instructional benefits; and establishing program accountability.
Preventing Reading Failure
Robert E. Slavin, Anne Chamberlain and Cecelia Daniels
The middle school years offer the last chance for many struggling students to build the literacy skills they will need to succeed in high school. Although many middle schools now offer reading instruction to all or most of their students, such intervention will only be effective if it responds to adolescent students' developmental needs and builds on their strengths. This article describes The Reading Edge, a program developed by the Success for All Foundation to break the cycle of reading failure that many adolescents experience. According to the authors, the program's components—cooperative learning, proactive classroom management, instruction in metacognitive skills, goal setting, and frequent assessment and feedback—work together to support student learning. Early evaluations of the program have demonstrated its effectiveness.
An Early Warning System
Ruth Curran Neild, Robert Balfanz and Liza Herzog
Many students who drop out of high school send strong distress signals for years. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the Philadelphia Education Fund found that these signals are embedded in ordinary data that school districts keep in student records, such as test scores, report card grades, behavior marks, attendance records, special education and English language learner status, and demographic categories. Studying cohorts of students in Philadelphia, the researchers found that 80 percent of the students who dropped out had sent a distress signal in the middle grades or during the first year of high school. A final grade of F in mathematics or English, poor attendance, or a final “unsatisfactory” behavior mark in at least one class signaled a three in four chance of students dropping out. Schools can use these data as an early warning system to flag students at risk of dropping out and intervene in time to keep them on the path to graduation. Several strategies have proven effective: early intervention models in the middle grades, identifying struggling high school students as early as the first or second marking period, and creating multiple pathways for out-of-school youth to earn their high school diplomas.
The Perils and Promises of Praise
Carol S. Dweck
Educators commonly believe that praising students' intelligence builds their confidence and motivation to learn and that students' inherent intelligence is the major cause of their school achievement. The author's research shows that, on the contrary, praising students' intelligence can be problematic. Praise is intricately connected to how students view their intelligence. Some students assume that intellectual ability is a fixed trait, that either they have it or they don't. Students in this fixed mind-set seek tasks that prove their intelligence and avoid ones that they might struggle with. Praising students for their intelligence tends to promote the fixed mind-set. Other students believe that they can develop their intellectual ability through effort and education. They take on challenges and learn from them. Praising students for their effort encourages this growth mind-set. Interventions that make students aware of the plasticity of the brain and the malleable quality of intelligence motivate students by boosting their confidence in their ability to grow and learn.
No More “Waiting to Fail”
Rachel Brown-Chidsey
This article describes Response to Intervention, an alternative approach to providing instructional support to struggling students. The author explains that concern about the large numbers of students identified as learning disabled (as well as the disproportionate numbers of minority students placed in special education) have led policymakers to seek alternative approaches. RTI includes three tiers of intervention, progressing from the general education curriculum (tier 1); through limited interventions such as small-group reading instruction (tier 2); to comprehensive evaluation and consideration for special education services (tier 3). Each tier requires frequent monitoring of student progress and provision of scientifically based instruction to all students. According to the author, RTI can result in “greater success for all students and fewer students placed in special education.”
The Early Learning Success Initiative
Bob Sornson
Honoring Student Stories
Gerald Campano
Students from immigrant, migrant, and refugee backgrounds often fail to live up to the image of the ideal student. Their education is often framed as a problem—of language, cultural integration, parental participation, and school readiness, to name a few. As a result, they tend to receive a different set of education and social interventions, such as tracking and remediation, which bar them from rich curricular experiences. One of the most powerful ways immigrant students can share their knowledge, partake in their own education development, and intervene on their own behalf is by telling their stories. Teachers can celebrate the human and academic value of student stories in a number of ways: by familiarizing themselves with books about the immigrant experience and encouraging students to read them, exposing students to the Western canon as well as to multicultural literature, providing space for rich story-telling traditions, acknowledging student narratives as intellectual resources, incorporating aspects of popular culture into the classroom, and sharing their own stories with students.
Delivering What Urban Readers Need
Shobana Musti-Rao and Gwendolyn Cartledge
Musti-Rao and Cartledge maintain that practices used in urban elementary schools—where a disproportionate number of students have reading deficits—often separate struggling students from instruction in reading skills that they sorely need. They maintain that to respond effectively to urban readers, schools should identify students with reading risk markers early and should provide interventions that teach basic reading skills explicitly at least through 2nd grade. The authors discuss seven strategies that enable teachers to intervene early and reach students at risk of reading failure: early identification of at-risk learners; supplemental instruction through 2nd grade; active student responding; small-group instruction; peer-mediated activities, positive versus exclusionary classroom management practices; and parental involvement.
The Need for Number Sense
Nancy C. Jordan
A signature characteristic of children with math difficulties and disabilities is difficulty quickly solving combinations, such as 9 + 7 or 16 - 9. Nancy Jordan's research suggests that this lack of computational fluency is rooted in deficiencies in number sense, or the intuitive knowledge of numbers. Children lacking number sense might struggle to add 3 + 2, because they don't understand its relationship to such combinations as 2 + 3, 3 + 3, and 5 - 3. Jordan's research group assessed children in kindergarten and again in 1st grade and found that number sense at the beginning of kindergarten is highly correlated with math achievement in 1st grade. Jordan suggests that schools regularly conduct number-sense assessments in kindergarten so that students who are likely to struggle with math get the support they need.
The Case for Late Intervention
Stephen Krashen and Jeff McQuillan
Although the prevailing wisdom is that early intervention within a crucial window of time is essential, Krashen and McQuillan argue that educators can help struggling readers by attending to possibilities for late intervention. The most effective late intervention is encouraging massive free voluntary reading. In free voluntary reading, the student reads because he wants to, without prescribed titles and without accompanying required tasks or pressure. Krashen and McQuillan describe a summer reading program for struggling 6th graders that used voluntary reading as its core strategy. The authors cite individual cases of homeschooled students who, after years of resisting reading instruction, began reading at a late age through voluntary reading. They address the most common objections to free voluntary reading as a late intervention: students' inability to read enough on their own to get started; students' dislike of reading; and students' tendency to choose only poor quality texts.
Insisting on Success
Andrew Beaton
The author, a high school principal, became convinced through his experience as an educator that schools should refuse to let students make the choice to fail. His school, Columbia Heights High School in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, implemented a schoolwide academic intervention program with three components: building frequent, regular academic accountability into the advisory program; requiring students who are not meeting academic standards to attend after-school tutoring; and providing a three-week credit-completion program after each trimester for students who have just barely failed a course. In one year, this insistence on success has greatly reduced student course failures and created a climate of increased expectations, accountability, and schoolwide support.
A New Vision for Garrett
Cindy Foreman
Cindy Foreman's son, Garrett, had strong skills in art and computers, but his poor reading abilities caused him to be held back twice. His school provided pull-out instruction and a special reading program, and his mother worked with him at home; however, by 6th grade, he only read at a 1st grade level. In 6th grade, he visited a developmental optometrist and was diagnosed with convergence insufficiency and oculomotor dysfunction and given a regimen of computer-based at-home vision therapy. After eight weeks of therapy, Garrett's independent reading level had climbed to 4th grade and his instructional reading level had reached 5th grade. Foreman believes that schools should be more aware of underlying reasons for students' academic problems, particularly vision disorders.
Learning Together, Living Together
Gene R. Carter
The Executive Director of ASCD joins a group of U.S. educators traveling to Israel on an education mission sponsored by the America-Israel Friendship League. The educators visit the Gesher al Hawadi school, which was established by the Hand in Hand Center for Jewish-Arab Education in Israel. Located in an Arab town, the school has equal numbers of Arab and Jewish students; offers a curriculum that teaches Judaism, Islam, and Christianity; instructs in both Hebrew and Arabic; and reaches out to the community to promote greater understanding among Arabs and Jews.
Supervising Generation X
Thomas R. Hoerr
Report Cards, Test Gaps, and Item Types
W. James Popham
Coaching Myths and Realities
Douglas B. Reeves
The Intervention Called NCLB
Amy M. Azzam
Best of the Blog
Laura Varlas
ASCD Community in Action
Journal Staff
Early Intervention at Every Age
Teresa Preston
When Max Took the Plunge
DJ Foley
A high school speech/language therapist describes how choosing the right book at the right time—Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson—helped her lead a nonreading freshman to finally complete a book on his own and develop a love for reading and deep sea diving. A meeting with the author of this nonfiction book, through the Reading Across Rhode Island program, cemented the student's confidence as a reader.
Copyright © 2004 by Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development
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