ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the financial, procedural, and substantive challenges of implementing a school-restructuring program, Success for All (SFA), in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The program was implemented in an inner-city school in which more than 50% of the students were coded as having special needs. A quasiexperimental study compared the reading achievement of 543 at-risk elementary students from one experimental and three control schools over 2 years, as measured by standardized reading measures. After 1 year, students participating in the SFA performed significantly better than control students on the Word Attack and Word Identification subtests of the Woodcock, and the Durrell and Gray Oral reading measures. After the first year, the Word Attack and Word Identification subtest scores were also significantly higher for the lower achieving 25% of SFA students than for similar control students. After the second year, the Passage Comprehension subtest was also significantly higher for these students.
