Study Links Student Achievement to America's Choice School Design

Philadelphia, PA—Students of teachers who more fully implemented the America's Choice Comprehensive School Reform Model learned more than did the students of teachers who had lower levels of implementation, according to a recently released report by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE), "The Relationship Between Teacher Implementation of America's Choice and Student Learning in Plainfield, New Jersey." In this report, authors Jonathan Supovitz and Henry May used data from Plainfield in which individual teachers' survey responses about America's Choice were linked to the test gains of their students.

Plainfield is a Kn12 urban school district that serves approximately 7,500 students in 10 elementary schools, 2 middle schools, and 1 high school. Plainfield is located in central New Jersey, about 30 miles from New York City. The students in the district are predominantly African American (71%) and Hispanic (28%). Sixty-five percent of the students receive either free or reduced-price lunch.

This strand of CPRE's evaluation of America's Choice gave CPRE researchers the opportunity to empirically explore the relationships between the practices of individual teachers and the learning of their students. By working closely with district administrators, CPRE researchers were able to link teacher-level implementation data to the district's student achievement databases while retaining the confidentiality of both teachers and students. The result is an uncommon piece of evidence that demonstrates the link between implementation and outcomes; a link that heavily influences modern evaluation research.

"The pattern from these results seems clear and persistent," state the authors. "The students of teachers with higher levels of implementation of America's Choice gained significantly more on state tests than students of low-implementing teachers, even after controlling for teacher and student background characteristics."

A major finding is that strong and consistent statistical relationships were present between instructors' preparation to teach readers and writers workshops (the major reading and writing instructional components of the America's Choice design) and student test performance gains when the relationship between two aspects of the readers and writers workshops—the essential aspects of the America's Choice Literacy Model—were tested. The authors also found that teachers whose beliefs were consistent with the philosophy underlying America's Choice tended to report deeper levels of implementation of the various components of America's Choice. Similarly, teachers who believed that the same standards should be applied to all students also reported deeper implementation of America's Choice. However, teacher beliefs were not statistically associated with gains in student test performance. Rather, it appears, teacher beliefs facilitated the implementation that produced students' learning gains.

It is important to understand the context of the implementation of America's Choice in Plainfield when reading this report. The district's leadership has taken an active interest in instructional improvement and embraced standards-based reform in general, and America's Choice in particular, throughout the district. This may be a contributing factor in the effectiveness of America's Choice in Plainfield.

Jonathan Supovitz is a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education and a Senior Researcher at CPRE. Henry May is a Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education and a Research Specialist at CPRE.

The Consortium for Policy Research in Education aims to improve elementary and secondary education with research on policy and practice, finance, school reform, and school governance. CPRE unites five of the nation's leading research institutions: the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.