K-12 Education

Chicago Public Schools: Evaluation of Two Reading Programs

Following a highly competitive process, Metis Associates was selected in 2007 to be one of the approved outside vendors that complement the Chicago Public Schools’ (CPS) research and evaluation capabilities. Soon, Metis was evaluating two large literacy programs. The first program, Supported Core Reading Materials Adoption (SCRMA), is the system’s effort to move schools toward using a common set of reading materials in grades kindergarten through five. The school system asked Metis to assist in measuring improvement in the ways the series are being used, the level and quality of professional development being provided by both publishers and the school district, and the oversight of literacy instruction in individual schools by the central office. Metis staff have conducted extensive field visits to case-study schools and conducted surveys and interviews. In its first-year report, Metis found that the implementation of each series had met the initial goals of the system.

In February 2008, Metis began a second project for CPS—a five-year evaluation of Striving Readers, a rigorous literacy initiative for struggling readers in grades six through eight.  CPS was one of only eight school systems to have been awarded a grant by the U.S. Department of Education in the first cycle of this program.  Metis is conducting a rigorous evaluation, using an experimental design involving observations, interviews, surveys, and very sophisticated analyses of achievement test data. It is comparing the 31 schools in this program with randomly assigned control schools. The program utilizes an unusual technology in which sixth graders are given hand-held computers for a variety of literacy-based activities.  Results have shown that, while the schools were still in the developing stages of the program, Striving Readers schools made significantly greater use than control schools of research-based instructional methods and small group, differentiated instruction for struggling readers.