Positive results for Success for All in national evaluations 

Success for All (SFA) - an elementary literacy model - was selected to receive a five-year scale-up grant under the U.S. Department of Education's Investing in Innovation (i3) competition. This report, the second from MDRC's independent evaluation of SFA's scale-up effort, discusses the program's implementation and impacts in 2012-2013. 

The evaluation uses a cluster random assignment design involving 37 schools serving students in kindergarten through grades 5 or 6 and located in five school districts; 19 schools were randomly selected to receive the SFA program, while the remaining 18 control group schools did not receive the intervention. Findings showed that first grade students who participated in the SFA program since kindergarten significantly outperformed students in the control group on two measures of phonics and decoding skills, the Woodcock-Johnson Word Attack scale and the Woodcock-Johnson Letter-Word Identification scale. Outcomes were similar for different categories of children, including African-American, Hispanic, and White children.

In addition, the Institute for Effective Education in the UK has published a new article reporting the third-year findings of a longitudinal evaluation of SFA in England. Their results reveal a statistically significant positive school-level effect for SFA schools compared with control schools on standardized reading measures of word-level and decoding skills. There were also directionally positive but non-significant school-level effects on measures of comprehension and fluency. A total of 18 SFA schools and 18 control schools across England, matched on prior achievement and demographics, were included in the quasi-experimental study.

Johns Hopkins University 

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