The two long-standing goals of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 are to improve schooling in high-poverty contexts and to advance the equality of education outcomes. During its 37-year history, Title I has achieved some notable success in reaching these goals. One need only walk into almost any high-poverty school in the United States and observe the extra resources, materials, programs, and personnel that Title I provides. Whether it is the preschool program, the comprehensive school reform model, the professional development program, the computers in the resource room, the summer school program, or the new teachers hired to help reduce class sizes, Title I helps in many ways. Some schools put their Title I funds to more productive uses than other schools, but whenever an inner-city or poor rural school produces an exemplary program that helps its students achieve notable results, Title I funding almost invariably made it possible.
History of Title I
Aside from these qualitative contributions, compelling research evidence suggests that Title I has met the needs of disadvantaged students. Long-term trend data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) indicated tremendous progress in the 1970s and 1980s in closing the persistent achievement gaps separating low-income and more advantaged students, and African American and white students (Grissmer, Flanagan, & Williamson, 1998; Smith & O'Day, 1991). During this period, the gaps between African American and white students, for instance, shrank by about two grade levels. Although the reasons are debatable, Grissmer and his colleagues asserted that Title I and the other social and education programs that were first introduced during the “War on Poverty” in the mid-1960s had an impact.
Supporting this contention, a comprehensive meta-analysis of the results from 17 federal evaluations and more than 40 million Title I students' test scores from 1966 through 1993 indicated that the 1970s and early 1980s were also the periods of the greatest improvements in Title I students' math and reading achievement outcomes (Borman & D'Agostino, 1996, 2001).
The early years of Title I, during the late 1960s, were marked by poor implementation and large-scale violations in the operation of the program. The program was not effective in closing the gap because it was not implemented as the U.S. Congress had intended. As the regulations and knowledge base for implementing effective Title I programs came into focus during the 1970s and 1980s, the intended recipients of the program's services, largely low-income and African American students, began to show clear benefits.
Although it is not possible to establish a true cause-effect relationship between the closing gaps and the improvements in Title I students' outcomes, two points are clear. First, our meta-analysis suggests that the students served by Title I clearly would have been worse off academically without the program. Second, the fact that the National Assessment of Educational Progress data show such tremendous national progress demonstrates that educational inequality can be overcome in a relatively short period of time when new policies and funding sources are targeted toward improving education and other services for disadvantaged students.
Beginning in the late 1980s, though, the important gains made by African American and low-income students began to slow and even erode (Grissmer et al., 1998). Combined with disappointing outcomes from the national evaluation of Title I in the early 1990s (Puma et al., 1997), a growing perception emerged among some Washington policymakers that Title I was largely ineffective. During the late 1990s, some policymakers called for the elimination of the program, and many others suggested that the funds should instead be allocated under a large block grant with few spending restrictions. The Title I legislation, which is authorized every five years, was truly at the crossroads when it was due to expire during the 1999–2000 congressional sessions. Adding even more drama, the program's fate was not sealed until more than two years later.
Making the Most of Title I Today
In January 2002, as part of President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, Title I received the largest funding increase in its history, pushing the total annual expenditures to more than $10 billion. The new Title I calls for stronger accountability mandates, including testing in grades 3–8 and holding schools and districts responsible for the achievement outcomes of minority students, low-income students, and English-language learners. Further, it specifies “scientifically based research” as the means by which schools must improve excellence and equality in student outcomes.
Given the central purpose of Title I—to close the achievement gap—and the clear emphasis on research-proven strategies within the No Child Left Behind Act, how should policymakers, administrators, and teachers use Title I moneys to respond to the ongoing challenge of attaining educational equality in U.S. schools?
Strong research evidence suggests that the achievement gap is already large when children enter kindergarten, that the gap increases as students go through school, and that summer learning differences may play an important role. Just as the evidence concerning the emergence of the achievement gap is strong, clear research-proven strategies for overcoming the gap also exist. Taken together, these strategies suggest a coherent and scientifically based national model for Title I programs that will help close the gap.
Start Early
Recent national data tell us that the achievement gaps between students attending high-poverty schools and students attending more affluent schools exist even as U.S. students begin kindergarten (Borman, Brown, & Hewes, 2002). Additionally, my colleagues and I found that the achievement gap between otherwise similar African American and white students expanded over the course of the kindergarten year. Similarly, Phillips, Crouse, and Ralph (1998) found that about half of the black-white achievement gap at the end of high school can be attributed to the fact that African American students begin school with fewer skills than white students; the other half is explained by the fact that African Americans then learn less than whites as they progress through school.
This evidence indicates that closing the gap must begin with a strong educational foundation of high-quality preschool and full-day kindergarten programs. Preschool interventions can help close the achievement gaps and can have important long-term impacts on students through middle school, high school, and even into adulthood (Barnett, 1995). In general, the model interventions emphasize small groups of disadvantaged students and provide intensive and costly services—as much as $10,000 per student per year, or 75 percent more than a typical public Head Start program. Some programs, like the Abecedarian Project, start students at birth, whereas others, like the Perry Preschool program, begin with 3- and 4-year-olds. These interventions generally have higher-quality staff, higher teacher-child ratios, and offer students and families a broader range of services than most Head Start and Title I preschool programs.
The Chicago Child-Parent Center is an example of one intensive and high-quality Title I-funded preschool and early education program. Begun in 1967, the Chicago Child-Parent Centers provide comprehensive child education and family support services to promote school readiness and positive adjustment among preschoolers, kindergarteners, and students in grades 1–3 for a total of up to six years of intervention. Promising research shows that this Title I program can make important differences in students' short- and long-term outcomes, including a 25 percent reduction in the high school dropout rate (Reynolds, Temple, Robertson, & Mann, 2001; Temple, 2000).
Extend Learning into the Summer
The widening of achievement gaps as students proceed through school would seem, quite naturally, to implicate the schools. This is not entirely the case, though. The growth in the achievement gaps may also be explained by differences in parenting practices, differing attitudes toward school among students, and other factors over which schools have relatively little control. Perhaps most important, data from a long-term study of students in Baltimore suggest that the widening of the gap between poor and middle-class students is not explained by differences in school-year learning rates, but by marked summer learning differences (Entwisle & Alexander, 1992, 1996).
Over the long summer break, all students tend to forget some of the material that they learned while school was in session. Harris Cooper and his colleagues estimated that during the summer break the typical child loses a little more than one month's worth of skill or knowledge in math and reading/language arts combined (Cooper, Nye, Charlton, Lindsay, & Greathouse, 1996). Low-income students have fewer out-of-school opportunities and resources to sustain the achievement gains that they make during school; their families and communities generally cannot compensate for the resources the school had been providing. As a result, over the summer, poor students tend to slip even farther behind their more advantaged peers. According to Entwisle and Alexander's study, simply adding the gap that existed at the beginning of elementary school to the gaps that are created during school breaks would account for virtually the entire achievement gap between middle-class and disadvantaged students at the end of high school.
To stop the summer learning slide and to help prevent the widening of the achievement gap, poor and minority students need more opportunities to extend their learning through the summer months. Cooper, Charlton, Valentine, and Muhlenbruck (2000) conducted a narrative review and meta-analysis of 93 evaluations of the effects of summer school on student achievement outcomes and concluded that summer school programs for either remediation or acceleration have a positive impact on the knowledge and skills of participants. Cooper and his colleagues further reported that summer remedial programs, typically designed for Title I students, have as much effect on achievement as programs with similar goals conducted over the course of an entire school year. Most important, these effects are essentially of the same magnitude as the summer learning difference between middle-class and disadvantaged students. Many major cities have recently established large-scale summer school programs, primarily to offer remediation to students who have fallen behind. Some of these programs, especially the Chicago Summer Bridge intervention (Roderick, Jacob, & Bryk, in press), have helped many students get back on track and avoid being held back a grade. These programs are worthy of replication in other cities. If we want to prevent summer learning losses, though, we need other programs that take a more proactive and preventive approach (Borman, 2001). We need to assess whether and how a series of yearly summer school programs specifically designed to halt the summer achievement slide could help prevent the achievement gaps from widening as students proceed through school.
Accelerate School-Year Learning
The potential strategies for accelerating the school-year learning of poor and minority students are diverse. Two strategies stand out as both research-proven and capable of widespread dissemination throughout Title I schools: reductions in class size, and the implementation of select comprehensive school reform models.
The Tennessee Student-Teacher Achievement Ratio Study (STAR) provided recent high-profile evidence of the achievement effects of reductions in K-3 class sizes (Finn & Achilles, 1990; Mosteller, Light, & Sachs, 1996). About 75 schools in Tennessee randomly assigned kindergarten students and teachers to class sizes of either approximately 15 or 23 students. Accomplishing this successfully was a feat in itself. In addition, analysis of the experimental data showed statistically significant, positive achievement effects during assignment to small classes in K-3 and sustained effects even after students had returned to regular classes (Finn, Gerber, Achilles, & Boyd-Zaharias, 2001; Nye, Hedges, & Konstantopoulos, 1999). According to Krueger and Whitmore (2001), the reductions in class size benefited minority students most of all and thereby helped close the achievement gap.
Along with Title I, comprehensive or whole-school reform models (for example, Success for All, Comer's School Development Program, and Accelerated Schools) and the federal Comprehensive School Reform Program are at the forefront of the national movement to initiate education innovations on the basis of research evidence.
Comprehensive school reform and the federal Comprehensive School Reform Program focus on reorganizing and revitalizing entire schools, rather than on implementing a number of specialized, and potentially uncoordinated, school improvement initiatives. From the 1990s to the present, external developers, such as personnel from universities, education laboratories, and independent nonprofit and for-profit companies, have cultivated a growing marketplace of replicable models for whole-school reform. Using funds from Title I and the Comprehensive School Reform Program, thousands of schools have purchased the reform models and the developers' technical assistance and have transformed student learning, teaching, and school management.
From a meta-analysis of 232 studies of the achievement effects of comprehensive school reform, my colleagues and I concluded that the overall effects of comprehensive school reform are statistically significant, meaningful, and more positive than the effects of other interventions that have been designed to serve similar purposes and student and school populations.
In addition to these overall effects of comprehensive school reform, we studied the specific effects of 29 of the most widely implemented models. Although the quality of the research was mixed, we concluded that three models in particular—Comer's School Development Program, Direct Instruction, and Success for All—had established strong evidence of statistically significant effects on achievement outcomes across relatively large and diverse collections of schools throughout the United States (Borman, Hewes, Rachuba, & Brown, in press).
Funding a Coordinated and Systemic Solution
A potential revolution in education is emerging as policymakers place greater emphasis on scientifically based evidence for informing classroom practice and reforming schools. For the first time, the U.S. Congress and other education policymakers are making some funding sources available to only those schools that implement education reforms with evidence of effectiveness. A coherent, evidence-based model will help move Title I in this direction and achieve its ultimate goal: to eradicate the achievement gap and defeat the vicious cycle of poverty.
The research base suggests that Title I funds, which amount to approximately $400 to $500 dollars per student (U.S. Department of Education, 2001), are not sufficient to close the gap alone. High-quality preschool programs cost as much as 20 times the typical Title I allocation amount; reductions in class size can cost about three times the amount; and quality comprehensive school reform programs, such as Success for All, can cost about 20 percent more (Borman & Hewes, 2001). Title I should be the cornerstone of the national effort to close the gap, but even larger funding increases and stronger commitments from other federal, state, and local agencies must be part of a long-term, coordinated, and systemic solution.
With significant investments in preschool, summer school, and school-year programs, solid research evidence suggests that we can significantly narrow and potentially eliminate the achievement gap. Further, investments such as these can produce long-term economic returns and benefits to our society that considerably outweigh their substantial costs (Barnett, 1985, 1992). One does not need evidence, though, to know that all students deserve these opportunities and that none deserve to be left behind without a high-quality education.
