Scale-Up and Educational Innovation: Lessons From Reading Recovery

• In Event: Final-Year Results From the External Evaluation of the Reading Recovery Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) Scale-Up

Abstract

The presenters will provide an overview of the federally funded five-year scale-up of Reading Recovery, Barriers and affordances to scaling an educational innovation will be outlined.

Six national reading reports over the last three decades and the ongoing review work of the U.S. Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse have yielded an abundance of evidence about effective instructional practices, particularly for young students having great difficulty learning to read and write. Despite this growing body of knowledge however a persistent problem remains, and that is how to bring evidence-based practices to scale (Denton, Vaugh, & Fletcher, 2003).

Efforts to reform education often fail because the innovations themselves represent a piecemeal approach to change rather than a design that can be replicated with good fidelity and scaled beyond the local educational setting where it was initially developed (Wilson and Daviss, 1994). Elmore (1996) summed up this problem of scale with this statement, “Innovations that require large changes in the core of educational practice seldom penetrate more than a fraction of U.S. schools and classrooms, and seldom last long when they do” (p.2).

In this context, where change is piecemeal and innovations unlikely to scale and last, Reading Recovery provides a good case to understand better the challenges of scaling. Reading Recovery has gone through a 30-year period of development and validation, producing the largest impacts on student reading skills of any intervention reviewed by the What Works Clearinghouse, (WWC, 2007) and making it one of the most promising reading interventions available for children.

Clay theorized as early as 1987 that in order for Reading Recovery to be effective, change would have to be achieved across the entire system in how teachers are trained and students are taught, in how schools are organized and how education is funded. Clay’s description of the deep change needed across a system to implement Reading Recovery fits well with the perspective that innovations need a design that can be replicated and redesigned through a research and development process and create deep change to core educational practices in order to scale up.

In this session, lessons learned from the most recent period of Reading Recovery’s expansion with the five year grant to scale up across the county, will be shared. Implications from this paper include the importance of adopting an initiative that has a well-articulated design, collecting data on the progress of the students served, and having a person in the district who acts as a “redirecting agent”, maintaining the design of the initiative and guarding it against tendencies to pare down the design. This presentation will be of interest to scholars who are investigating challenges of scaling-up innovations and those working directly involved in scale up work.

Authors

• Emily M. Rodgers, The Ohio State University

• Jerome V. D'Agostino, The Ohio State University