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Geoffrey Borman

July 2005

The U.S. Department of Education’s Title I program aims “to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging state academic achievement standards and state academic assessments.”

The use of Title I funds has been controversial. In part, this is because some schools have 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, says UW-Madison education professor Geoffrey Borman (see sidebar).

In recent research, Borman found compelling evidence suggesting that Title I has met many needs of disadvantaged students. Long-term trend data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) indicate 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. During this period, the gap between African American and White students, for instance, shrank by about two grade levels.

It’s not possible to establish a true cause-and-effect relationship between the closing gaps and the improvements in Title I students’ outcomes, yet two points are clear, Borman says. First, the students served by Title I clearly would have been worse off academically without the program. Second, the fact that the NAEP data show such remarkable national progress demonstrates that educational inequality can be reduced in a relatively short time when new policies and funding sources target improving education and other services for disadvantaged students.

Given the central purpose of Title I—to close the achievement gap—and the emphasis of the No Child Left Behind Act on research-proven strategies, how should policymakers, administrators, and teachers use Title I funds to continue to work toward attaining educational equality in U.S. schools? Borman suggests the following:

Start early. Evidence indicates that closing the gaps must begin with a strong educational foundation of high-quality preschool and full-day kindergarten programs. Preschool interventions help close achievement gaps and can have important long-term effects on students through middle school and high school and even into adulthood.

Extend learning into the summer. Over the long summer break, all students tend to forget some of the material they learned during the school year. It has been estimated that during the summer break the typical child loses more than one month’s worth of skill or knowledge in math and reading/language arts combined. Low-income students have fewer out-of-school opportunities and resources to sustain the achievement gains they make during the school year. As a result, over the summer, poor students tend to slip even farther behind their more advantaged peers.

Accelerate school-year learning. There are many strategies for accelerating the school-year learning of poor and minority students. Borman identifies two strategies that stand out as both research-proven and capable of widespread dissemination throughout Title I schools: reducing class size and implementing select comprehensive school reform models. Using funds from the U.S. Department of Education’s Title I and Comprehensive School Reform programs, thousands of schools have purchased reform models and developers’ technical assistance and transformed student learning, teaching, and school management.

Comprehensive reform

From a meta-analysis of 232 studies of the achievement effects of comprehensive school reform, Borman concluded that the overall effects of such reform are statistically significant, meaningful, and more positive than the effects of other interventions that have been designed to serve similar purposes and similar student and school populations.

In addition to the overall effects of comprehensive school reform, Borman studied the specific effects of 29 of the most widely implemented models. He found three models in particular that had established strong evidence of statistically significant effects on achievement outcomes across relatively large and diverse collections of schools throughout the U.S.—the Comer School Development Program, Direct Instruction, and Success for All.

Solid research evidence suggests that with significant investments in preschool, summer school, and school year programs, the achievement gap can be significantly narrowed and potentially eliminated, Borman says. Further, investing in programs such as these can produce long-term economic returns and benefits to our society that considerably outweigh their substantial costs.

For more information about the U.S. Department of Education’s Comprehensive School Reform program, see http://www.ed.gov/programs/compreform/index.html.

Funding: Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed At Risk (CRESPAR) and the National Institute on Educational Governance, Finance, Policymaking, and Management.

This material originally appeared in different form in Educational Leadership, Dec 2002/Jan 2003, Vol. 60, Issue 4.