ASBURY PARK, N.J. -- "Sad Sam" is the book of the day in Janet Raines' first-grade classroom at Bangs Avenue Elementary School.

Mario and Chris, a pair of 6-year-olds, read the book as partners -- sitting side by side, facing in opposite directions.

"Sad Sam can do trrrr ," Mario begins.

"Tricks," says Chris, following along in his own book.

Back and forth they go, while Raines moves about the room, encouraging her 14 students grouped in similar pairs.

On this October morning, exercises in "partner reading" are being repeated in 1,130 Success For All schools across the nation, from this faded East Coast resort to Chase Elementary in Baltimore County to the inner-city schools of Los Angeles.

Designed at the Johns Hopkins University primarily for elementaries with a high percentage of children from poor families, Success For All replaces scattershot approaches to reading instruction with a highly structured, phonics-intensive approach that changes how children are grouped, taught and tested.

Among urban elementary-school reform efforts these days, it is the hottest program in the country -- widely perceived as successful, though not without its critics.

A New Jersey court recently recommended it for use in hundreds of schools in low-income areas.

But even though Success For All was created and first tested in Baltimore, continues to be tightly dictated from here and is used in 21 Baltimore County schools, it is not being used in a single Baltimore City school.

"We're proud of Success For All, except in Baltimore," says Robert E. Slavin, the Hopkins researcher and father of the program.

The program was born when Slavin was approached by city education leaders in 1986 and asked to restructure a school, Abbottston Elementary near Memorial Stadium, so that no child would fail to read.

The experiment eventually involved five city schools.

While Success For All's results at the five Baltimore schools gained national attention, the program died here by the mid-1990s.

"It died from benign neglect, which is not unusual in Baltimore," acknowledges Walter G. Amprey, who resigned last year as city school superintendent. "There's plenty of blame for everyone, including me.

"A program like this has to have leadership from the top. I should have been on top of it, but I wasn't, and my emphasis on site-based decision-making made it easy for a new principal at the schools to simply drop out. I regret that now."

Adds Kalman R. "Buzzy" Hettleman, a Baltimore consultant and former city school board member who was among those who approached Slavin 12 years ago: "Bob has changed the national conversation by focusing on the best practices that are backed up by research."

End to frustration

At Thurgood Marshall Elementary, another Asbury Park school, Kathy Ahl, a Success For All facilitator, agrees. She says the program ended her 26 years of frustration as a reading teacher "while we wallowed about with one program after another, one publisher after another."

Success For All "brings together all of the elements that make for a good reading program and puts them in a highly organized pattern," Ahl says.

More than that, the program virtually restructures entire schools -- so much so that, before it goes into a school, 80 percent of the teachers must commit to it.

The program starts each day with reading.

Marching to the cheery tune of "Good Morning, Good Morning," every child, book bag in hand, goes off to a 90-minute reading period that is the bedrock of Success For All.

The period is deliberately sacrosanct, devoted exclusively to language arts.

At Bangs Avenue Elementary in Asbury Park, Raines' first-graders know the routine. The first activity is a drill in the phonics of "Sad Sam," written by Slavin.

"My turn," Raines says. "Sssss, aaaa, duh. Sad. Your turn."

The students repeat: "Sssss, aaaa, duh. Sad."

"Good! Now my turn. Sssss, aaaa, mmmm. Your turn "

Follow the script

This is tightly scripted. Success For All supplies hundreds of thin paperback storybooks to each of its schools, as many as 50 per grade in numbered sequence.

They are carefully designed to build students' awareness of the sounds of the language. Any deviations from that sequence must be approved by a facilitator stationed at each school.

"You don't want a robotic classroom," says Gerry Karol, Bangs Avenue's facilitator, "but you don't want everybody going off and doing their own thing.

"We fumbled around for years before SFA."

That was before 1992, the year Bangs Avenue became New Jersey's first Success for All school.

Now all three of Asbury Park's elementary schools are in the fold -- and the program has been recommended for 319 other elementaries in 28 of the state's poorest districts as part of a settlement of a state school finance lawsuit.

Reading instruction in Success For All's early grades relies heavily on phonics.

Students learn early to distinguish between "go" words (printed in green) that can be sounded out according to phonetic rules, and "stop" words (printed in red) that are irregularly pronounced and thus need to be memorized.

Some say the program is too phonics-oriented, but Slavin says a heavy dose of phonics is essential for beginning readers from poverty backgrounds.

More than phonics

At the same time, in line with the current national consensus on how reading should be taught, Success For All follows phonics with a lot of storytelling, literature, writing and in-school book clubs -- less-structured elements from the competing "whole language" method of reading instruction.

Students are tested every eight weeks and grouped according to reading ability; those who fall behind are given one-on-one tutoring.

Parents are expected to read to their children 20 minutes each evening, and a family support team -- made up of the principal, facilitator, counselor and others -- works to alleviate social problems that can impede learning.

Slavin says it's impossible to guarantee success in reading for every child without "doing a heart-lung operation" on a school.

"You have children who are homeless, who are poor, who don't have two parents and who are at risk of academic failure," he says.

"You have to have a comprehensive plan that addresses these needs, too.

"Otherwise, you'll have success for some. Or none."

Growing fast

None of this is cheap. Success For All sends out a huge quantity of materials, with each school receiving dozens of boxes of curriculum materials and teaching manuals. Program trainers spend 23 days a year in each school.

Schools with 500 students pay about $70,000 the first year, $30,000 the second and $20,000 the third; most use federal compensatory education funds.

Nevertheless, the number of schools using the program nationally (along with Roots and Wings, its newer companion for mathematics and social studies) has quadrupled in the past three years -- prompting even Slavin to worry that success could spoil Success for All.

There are signs of stress. Chase Elementary School in Baltimore County, after plunking down $20,000 for Success For All, had to wait more than a year for materials to arrive, says Principal Maria Hofmann.

"I wasn't happy," she says. "It's an excellent program, but they might be growing too fast."

Says Slavin: "Our challenge now is to maintain integrity while growing, and we think we can do it."

To accommodate the rapid growth, Slavin and Nancy Madden, his wife and fellow researcher, severed the nonprofit Success For All Foundation from Hopkins and will move next month from cramped quarters on North Charles Street to Towson.

Large education enterprise

The foundation has a budget of $30 million and 250 full-time employees, making it one of Baltimore's largest education enterprises.

Hopkins research scientist Samuel C. Stringfield, who has no association with the program, says, "Slavin had the right idea at the right time."

Even Congress has taken note.

In November 1997, it passed the Obey-Porter Bill, which offers $145 million in annual incentive grants to schools that undertake "whole-school" reform such as Success For All.

Also, the program is by far the most popular of eight "break-the-mold designs" approved and subsidized by the privately financed New American Schools Corp.

At Bangs Avenue Elementary, Ann Cramer, the second-grade teacher, likes Success For All but complains it "takes away creativity."

Slavin says that's because the devil in school reform is in the details. Many other well-intended programs have failed, he says, because carrying them out was left to chance.

"People love the flag, then they do as little as possible to honor it," he says. "We're talking about serious changes in schools. We offer the flag, but there's got to be actual substance and structure if a school wants to possess it.

"If we give it away too easily, schools will do the least things necessary. They've got to feel it's a real privilege to have the program."

Student gains

Success For All has a growing body of results. In St. Mary's County, it gets credit for increases in Maryland School Performance Assessment Program scores. At the five original schools in Baltimore, students showed almost a full year's gain by the fifth grade over those in other schools.

But critics say most of these evaluations have been conducted by Slavin and others associated with him. Slavin concedes that some of his evidence is self-generated, but "we've reported our own failures as well as our successes."

"Success For All is as thoroughly documented as any design you can name," he says.

One researcher, Richard Venezky, of the University of Delaware, found a mixed picture at the Baltimore schools: "On the one hand, it was well implemented, it had a good structure for reading. When you compare Success For All schools to similar urban schools doing nothing, clearly Success For All is better.

"On the down side, I found that by the fifth grade, kids were two years behind grade level in reading. Are these kids really succeeding? The answer is no, and that's devastating."

Slavin acknowledges the Baltimore students were behind grade level by the fifth grade, but they were a grade level ahead of students in "control" schools. Moreover, he says, "All of the schools were among the poorest in the city."

Stanley Pogrow -- a University of Arizona professor and Slavin rival who heads a program called Higher Order Thinking Skills -- lashes out bitterly at Success For All, calling it a "house of cards" with "methodology and research that make no sense."

Conflict of interest?

Pogrow and others say Slavin, wearing hats simultaneously as international authority on school reform, head of the nation's fastest-growing school reform program and head of a separate federally financed research organization at Hopkins (the Center for Social Organization of Schools) is in a three-way conflict of interest.

But Madden responds that all of those efforts should be intertwined: "We're not just doing a program. We're trying to change a way of thinking, and that means operating at the policy level and trying to change the way research happens."

Slavin can be disarmingly frank.

He says he discouraged New Jersey officials from ordering his program exclusively. "There are other good designs out there," he says, "and there's plenty of room for competition."

Pub Date: 11/15/98