Scaling and Sustaining an Intervention: The Case of Reading Recovery

ABSTRACT

In every school district across the country, every year, initiatives are adopted with the goal of improving the literacy performance of young students, and, just as frequently, these initiatives fail or quickly become passing fads. In this article, Rodgers reviews literature related to scaling educational innovations and describes challenges and barriers to implementing and maintaining evidence-based reform. Using Reading Recovery as a case example, she describes features of the intervention that are thought to be linked to its longevity in terms of scalability and sustainability. She also shares lessons learned from the most recent period of its expansion with the 5-year grant to scale up Reading Recovery across the county. Implications from this article include the importance of adopting an initiative that has a well-articulated design, collecting data on the progress of the students served, and having a person in the district who acts as a redirecting agent, maintaining the design of the initiative and guarding it against tendencies to pare down the design.

Acknowledgments

This article was prepared with the support of a U.S. Department of Education i3 award to Jerome D'Agostino, Principal Investigator, to scale up Reading Recovery, Office of Innovation and Improvement (Grant/Award Number #U396A100027).