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Literacy Intervention Programs Work

June 6, 2005

Instructional improvement intervention programs like Accelerated Schools, America's Choice, and Success for All can have powerful effects on the enacted curriculum in U.S. schools. UW-Madison education professor Eric Camburn and colleagues studied literacy instruction in third-grade classrooms in 53 high-poverty schools. They found that literacy instruction varies widely across classrooms, largely as a result of teachers' participation in 1 of the 3 instructional improvement interventions. These findings suggest that teachers have less autonomy in enacting the curriculum than is suggested by popular images of schools as loosely coupled systems and teachers as curriculum brokers. In fact, Camburn says, intervention programs can have powerful effects, and curriculum coverage in the U.S. classrooms can be treated as an alterable variable in discussions of education reform. Camburn's home page is here.