Thomas D. Cook, H. David Hunt, and
Robert F. Murphy
Abstract
Using 5th through 8th grade students, the Comer
School Development Program was evaluated in 10 inner city Chicago
schools over four years, contrasting them with 9 randomly selected
no-treatment comparison schools. Comer schools implemented more
program details than the controls but were not faithful to all
program particulars. Student ratings of the school's social climate
improved soon after the program began and, by the last two study
years, both the students' and teachers' perceptions of the school's
academic climate had also improved relative to the control schools.
By these last years, Comer schools were also gaining about three
percentile points more than the controls in both reading and math
and students in them reported less acting out on a scale whose
items are correlated with more serious offending in later life.
Students in Comer schools also endorsed more conventional norms
about misbehaving and reported greater ability to control their
anger. However, the Comer program did not benefit either students'
mental health or their participation in activities that adults
consider wholesome. Explanations for the achievement and acting
out results are offered based on student and staff data about
school climate, on insights from an ethnography conducted in the
program schools, and on contrast with the evaluation results from
Prince George's County, Maryland, where a different variant of
the program failed to achieve any positive outcomes.
Paper was published in American Educational Research Journal,
Summer 2000, Vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 535-597.
Thomas D. Cook, Department
of Sociology, Northwestern University H. David Hunt, Postdoctoral Fellow,
Institute for Policy Research Robert F. Murphy, Graduate Fellow, Human Development
and Social Policy Program, School of Education and Social Policy,
Northwestern University
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