Success for All

History

Success For All is a schoolwide curricular program that organizes resources in an attempt to ensure that each student acquires adequate basic skills in reading, writing, and language arts. SFA was created by Robert Slavin, his wife Nancy Madden, and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University and was based on existing principles of reading instruction that were shown to be effective in teaching children to read. These principles favored an approach in which phonics skills were explicitly taught. SFA was launched in 1987 with a pilot program in one elementary school in Baltimore, Maryland. That year, Slavin found that SFA students had better reading scores than students not participating in the program. The program expanded to five other schools in Baltimore the next year. Since its inception, SFA has grown to include students in PreK–6 and to address other curricular areas (e.g., math).

The Success for All Model

Success For All is one of the most widely implemented, widely researched, and widely critiqued curriculum reform models in the United States. At the heart of the SFA program is 90 minutes of uninterrupted, daily reading instruction. This instruction is scripted so that regardless of teacher, classroom makeup, or geographic location of the school, the instruction is the same. Students are generally grouped across classes and grades by reading level. The program is purchased as a comprehensive package that includes materials, training, ongoing professional development, and a prescribed plan for delivering and sustaining the model. Salient features of the model include: prescribed reading sessions, regular assessments, one-to-one tutoring, establishment of a solutions team, and appointment of a full-time facilitator.

Prescribed reading sessions include various strategies that focus on development of language skills for students in primary grades and development of comprehension skills for students in the upper grades. Specifically, the reading program in kindergarten and first grade emphasizes language and comprehension skills, phonics, sound blending, and decoding of shared stories. In Grades 2–6, students use novels or basal readers and focus on comprehension skills of summarization and clarification, and development of writing skills. Teaching strategies most often used, regardless of grade level, include: reading by the teacher to the students, choral reading, phonics and word-attack strategies, vocabulary lessons, writing, and direct instruction. Each 90-minute session is strictly choreographed. That is to say, at any given time during the lesson an observer might see and hear virtually the same thing from both teachers and students in each class of the same grade.

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