A Jump Start to see if children can keep moving ahead

Friday, July 21, 2006

These are the Jump Start kids, students from three elementary schools — George Washington Carver, Green Holly and Lexington Park.

The thought is that by spending an extra month in school with one teacher for each 10 students, these students can improve their reading and math skills so they can keep up with their peers when the regular school year starts.

It’s an approach that deserves the support it has gotten. It seems to be common sense that kids who are having trouble in school at an early age can turn things around with some extra help. It appeals to the belief that work and innovation can make a difference in how well children do in schools.

This is Jump Start’s third year, and the results so far have been encouraging. Last year 90 percent of the students who were in the program maintained or showed progress in reading skills. This is a good sign because struggling students often slip after the long summer vacation from school.

As these children continue their schooling, there will be more complete evidence to judge how well this experiment has succeeded.

And so a word of caution here. With all the pressure on educators to prove that their students are improving as measured by standardized tests, schools have an incentive to use these measurements to show that what they are doing works. They also have incentives to emphasize the good news in test scores and disguise the bad news.

But to live up to their responsibilities as educators, teachers and administrators have to look at their own work with clear eyes, and search for the real lessons that the blizzard of test score numbers can teach as time goes on.

Not everything that we think should work does work. Studies that have looked at children who have grown into teenagers and adults have, for example, cast doubts on the effectiveness of the school-based DARE substance-abuse prevention program in discouraging drug and alcohol abuse in later years. Research also questions whether the boost Head Start is intended to give preschoolers actually improves their chances of succeeding in school beyond the early grades.

We all like to think that good-faith efforts like these will pay off. It’s tough to be willing to look at evidence that says they don’t. But that is what is necessary.

This shouldn’t diminish enthusiasm for Jump Start. Without the drive and optimism to try new approaches, some children will not be offered the chance they need to succeed in school and in life.

In five years, in 10 years, a clearer picture of whether the extra effort and expense of Jump Start made a real difference will emerge. When the time comes for an honest look at how well these students do in later years, school officials must take it.

When any innovative approach fails to pan out, the response of the rest of us should be to understand that the goal is to keep what works and eliminate what doesn’t, not to punish those who pushed a well-intended idea that does not measure up when the results are in.