Teach Effectively!

The US Department of Education What Works Clearinghouse released new reviews of practices last week. One is about “New Chance” and the other is about “First Things First.” Here are the descriptions of the interventions from the WWC pages (based on what WWC could obtain from publicly available documents).

New Chance:

New Chance, a program for young welfare mothers who have dropped out of school, aims to improve both their employment potential and their parenting skills. Participants take GED (General Educational Development) preparation classes and complete a parenting and life skills curriculum. Once they complete this first phase of the program, they can receive occupational training and job placement assistance from New Chance, which also offers case management and child care.

First Things First:

First Things First is a reform model intended to transform elementary, middle, and high schools serving significant proportions of economically disadvantaged students. Its three main components are: (1) “small learning communities” of students and teachers, (2) a family and student advocate system that pairs staff members and students to monitor and support progress and that serves as a bridge between the school and family, and (3) instructional improvements to make classroom teaching more rigorous and engaging and more closely aligned with state standards and assessments.

The WWC analysis reports that neither practice had strong beneficial effects.

In both cases, the WWC based its review on one study about the effects of the practice. Although the individual studies pass muster as relatively rigorous, they still constitute only an individual study, not a corpus of literature. One has to wonder whether there might be 2, 5, or 50 other studies that may not be quite as rigorous but that show clear effects. Please do not misunderstand: I’m not saying that such evidence exists in these cases…just wondering about the trustworthiness of the WWC review methods based on what it did with Reading Recovery and Direct Instruction.

To read, download, and print the reports, see the WWC pages on New Chance and First Things First.