Success for All gets kids reading. Why don’t more schools use it?

Decades of research show that a school reform program called Success for All is one of the most effective ways to teach reading to kids — especially struggling students. It helped one of the poorest school districts in Ohio become a national leader in third grade reading scores. But even as schools across the country are under pressure to use literacy curricula backed by research, the popularity of Success for All has been dwindling.

The program has never been reviewed by EdReports, an influential organization whose curriculum ratings many school districts consult when buying instructional materials. Some states use EdReports to decide which programs to recommend — or even ban schools from using programs without positive reviews. At least 42 schools have scrapped Success for All in recent years as a result, according to the organization that promotes the program.

But even before the rise of EdReports, Success for All had been in decline. In 2000, some 1,800 schools across the United States, United Kingdom and Mexico used the program, according to news reports at the time. Today that number is down by more than half, to just 800 schools. The finances of the nonprofit organization behind Success for All have taken an even bigger hit. Since 2002, annual revenue at the Success for All Foundation dropped from more than $100 million, adjusted for inflation, to less than $13 million in 2023, the most recent year publicly available.

Steubenville City Schools, the poor Ohio school district with stellar reading scores, has stuck with the program through all those years. But most other places haven’t. Administrators from six schools and districts that have dropped Success for All pointed to a variety of reasons: teacher opposition, logistical challenges, and administrative turnover, to name a few.

“Every one of our teachers here wanted that curriculum,” said Toni Hartung, principal of Allen T. Allison Elementary in Chester, West Virginia, which started using Success for All in 2014. “It worked very well for us.” But Hartung said other schools in the district didn’t feel the same way, so the county board of education voted to drop it in 2021.

A program born at Johns Hopkins

Success for All was developed in the 1980s by husband-and-wife research team Robert Slavin and Nancy Madden, who were both professors at Johns Hopkins University. Their goal was to put high-quality research into practice. Slavin, who died in 2021, and Madden built their program using teaching methods that had been shown to work in previous studies. And the program went beyond curriculum to include initiatives on attendance, homework, family involvement and more. 

Since its inception four decades ago, numerous studies have shown that Success for All effectively teaches foundational reading skills. Nine of those studies were deemed rigorous by the What Works Clearinghouse, a federal project that reviews education research. “We were researchers; we did everything as a study,” Madden said in an interview.

Bolstered by research, federal funding and growing demand, Success for All scaled up dramatically through the 1990s. By 2000, it boasted a cumulative reach of one million students. 

But the following year, Reading First, a federal initiative promoting “scientifically based” reading instruction, unexpectedly pushed schools in other directions, precipitating a rapid collapse in Success for All’s reach. 

“It was horrendous,” Madden recalled. 

The slide continued in the years that followed.

New superintendents bring new programs

One reason some schools abandon Success for All is a change in leadership. The program is often introduced by a superintendent, only to be dropped when someone new takes over. In one Pennsylvania district, a school board member who had been skeptical of Success for All used a change in leadership to push for a different program. The average tenure for a superintendent in the United States is only five years, meaning there are frequent opportunities for new leaders to change direction. 

Student and teacher turnover can also make it difficult to implement Success for All with consistency. In Geary County Unified School District, home to Fort Riley military base in Kansas, about 15% of teaching staff and 60% of students turn over each year. Before 2019, schools in the district were using four different programs at the same time, among them Success for All. 

Under such varied conditions, results were uneven and the district struggled to maintain consistent instruction, explained Jennifer Hansen, who oversees English language arts for Geary County. So, when a new superintendent took over in 2018, he decided to unify around a new program.

An unusual approach to reading groups

A key feature of Success for All’s reading instruction, known as cross-grade-level grouping, is also a reason some districts stop using it. Students are grouped by ability so that they receive reading instruction that is better tailored to their skill level. This can mean that a second grader who is behind attends reading class with first graders, and one who is ahead could join a group with third graders.

This approach is designed to meet students where they are, but it requires that all teachers teach reading, and it takes students out of their classrooms during reading class. It also means that struggling students may not be exposed to more difficult books, and some teachers worry that could make it harder for those students to catch up. Tim Shanahan, a prominent reading researcher, has also raised this concern. “You’re holding a lot of kids back,” Shanahan said. 

In Steubenville, this is rarely a problem, because virtually all students are reading at grade level or above, but not all schools have such uniform success.

Hansen says that her district saw good results at lower grade levels, but that did not translate to longer-term progress. By fifth grade, some students were still behind. By middle school, students struggled with more complex texts, revealing gaps in their vocabulary and ability to sound out words, Hansen said.

For some teachers, it felt ‘robotic’

Success for All is sometimes described as a “scripted” program, meaning that lesson plans guide teachers in what to present — and even what to gesture at. 

“We didn’t depend on teachers to make stuff up,” Madden said, explaining that the program’s materials were standardized based on what past studies had shown to work. But what Madden saw as a virtue became one of the program’s biggest criticisms. 

Ryan Mariouw, a curriculum and assessment coordinator at Weston Preparatory Academy in Detroit, says many teachers found the lessons overly rigid. “They didn’t necessarily love having to be on a certain page on a certain day at a certain time. They almost felt like it was robotic.” The academy stopped using Success for All in 2018.

An expensive approach — at first

Cost is another factor that has driven some schools to drop Success for All.

At Weston Preparatory Academy, the cost became prohibitive once the school lost key grant funding. “If the price point was better, I think we’d probably still be using it,” Mariouw said.

Schools starting out with Success for All typically spend about $150 per student per year, according to Evidence for ESSA, a curriculum review website based at Johns Hopkins that takes its name from the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015. That price tag would place it roughly on par with several reading curricula reviewed by the Indiana Department of Education — some of the only publicly available cost estimates comparing the prices of various reading programs.

But as a whole school reform model, Success for All requires a complete overhaul of how schools run and teach. A 2015 study found the program carried significant indirect costs such as program facilitation, professional development, teacher time and extra classroom space. The study concluded that, accounting for those expenses, Success for All cost $1,811 per student per year, $227 more than an unidentified “control group” of schools spent. 

An earlier study acknowledged the program was more expensive than others but noted that it also saved schools money by resulting in fewer students repeating grades and ending up in special education. 

“Although Success for All was a rather costly program, it still was so effective in preventing a lot of these other very costly interventions that, in the long run, it actually cost just the same,” said Geoffrey Borman, now a professor at Arizona State University.

The Success for All Foundation estimates its total cost is split roughly evenly between materials and training.

Although direct costs decline significantly after the start-up phase, schools must still budget for ongoing training and updates. Madden says that without “ that sort of intensity for monitoring the data, for looking for the cracks in implementation, for shoring up the energy, the results will decay.”

Steubenville has been using the program for more than two decades and is able to cover reading and math instruction across six elementary schools and one middle school for just $25 per student, according to Melinda Young, the superintendent of Steubenville City Schools. Despite spending less per student than 80% of Ohio districts, Steubenville ranked third in the state for third grade reading proficiency in 2024. 

Success for All sees growth among Catholic schools, charters

The Success for All Foundation is aware of the complaints some schools have about its program and has made changes in response. The foundation has created more flexible grouping options for younger students, and schools now have the choice to keep students with their peers starting in third grade. The program also tailors instruction to schools’ specific needs by incorporating district- or state-mandated materials, Madden said. 

Madden is optimistic about the future. Success for All recently received $13.5 million from an anonymous donor to subsidize start-up costs for new schools. The program has also grown in religious schools and charter networks. Four years ago, four Catholic schools in Los Angeles used Success for All; that number will grow to 28 this fall.

“We have always appealed to both sides of the fence,” Madden said. “We will work in charters, we will work in religious schools, we will work in public schools. All kids can benefit from support.”