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| Thomas Cook |
The report, issued last fall, revealed that:
Both students and staff saw improvements in the academic climate in Comer schools relative to control schools, and students rated the social climate as better.
Reading and math scores improved by 3 to 5 points more than the control schools on standardized national tests over four years.
Student reports of mischievous and delinquent behaviors showed steadily declining trends relative to the controls on a measure that researchers have shown is related to criminal conduct in adulthood. Buttressing these results, Comer students experienced less anger and better control of their anger relative to control schools and reported they were becoming more conventional in their beliefs toward misbehavior and delinquency.
The student effects are an unusual combination, said Thomas D. Cook (IPR-Sociology), who directed the evaluation. He pointed out that few school reforms target both academic performance and behavior modification and it is very rare to see both effects come about.
The Comer Program was designed by Dr. James Comer at Yale and first implemented in several New Haven public schools in the 1970s. By 1990, 70 schools nationwide had implemented the program, and by 1995 it had been adopted in 563 elementary, middle, and high schools in 80 school districts throughout 22 states.
The program is based on the idea that a wide range of student outcomes can be enhanced by improving the interpersonal relationships and social climate of a school prior to enhancing its focus on academic achievement. It encourages each school to determine its own academic and social goals and emphasizes a spirit of collaborative working relationships, trust, and respect among its adults.
Assessing the significance of the findings, Cook said, "In many respects, Chicago schools are already on an upward-moving escalator, but the Comer schools are outpacing even the escalator. Achievement and acting-out results are each quite large for what educational interventions typically attain, and taken together they are even more socially important."
The researchers evaluated the impact of the Comer program on more than 10,000 5th-through-8th-grade students over four years. Students were low-income and predominantly African-American, Latino, and Asian. Ten Comer and nine control schools voluntarily participated in the evaluation. They were randomly assigned to Comer or control groups.
Data for the study's cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses were drawn from responses to a series of detailed surveys by students, teachers, and other staff in Comer schools. These were compared with responses from the nine control schools. However, many of the latter were also "becoming somewhat more Comer-like" over the study period as Chicago's central school administrators were stressing decentralized methods of administration and planning as well as academic achievement.
Comer students and teachers both came to see academic climate as improving: Teachers said they made more efforts to motivate their students and felt more efficacious in the class-room while students said their teachers were doing more to encourage them to achieve and felt their classmates were more accepting of school values.
While the Comer program seems to have reduced negative behaviors, it did not improve positive behaviors (i.e., engaging in activities adults consider worthwhile, such as after-school sports, clubs, or doing homework). Nor did it have positive benefits on mental health measures.
The investigators are less sure of the reasons for these findings. They speculate that the system-wide push to improve school management and academic achievement undoubtedly affected all Chicago schools, perhaps providing a favorable climate within which reform efforts like the Comer model are more likely to be effective. Another possible factor was the decision by Youth Guidance‹a social service agency for at-risk youth whose social workers acted as Comer school facilitators‹to pay more attention to curriculum development in the last three years of the evaluation. Its counseling skills also may have contributed to the decline in students' "acting-out" behaviors.
The report, "Comer's School Development Program in Chicago: A Theory-Based Evaluation," was written by Cook, H. David Hunt, an IPR postdoctoral fellow, and IPR graduate fellow Robert F. Murphy. Funding was provided by the MacArthur Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.
"The Comer program changes schools in positive ways," said Cook, "but it does not lead to a radical transformation." The report recommended that studying more sites would enrich the evaluation and several more years of data collection could help determine whether these positive gains persist over time.
The Chicago report is the second in a series of empirical and ethnographic studies of the Comer program. The first found no significant effects of Comer in the more middle-class minority middle schools in Prince George's County, Maryland (PGC). Cook says the PGC findings were based on just two years of exposure during middle school, perhaps too short a span for impacts. Also, its implementation was not as academically focused as Chicago's eventually became.