The federal What Works Clearinghouse posted a couple of new reports yesterday: one on a preschool program called the Creative Curriculum and another updating the research on Success for All.

Let's start with the good news. Success for All, as most of you probably know, is a widely used schoolwide improvement program aimed at students in prekindergarten through 8th grade. Clearinghouse analysts reviewed the evidence for Success for All once before, in 2006, but this newer report incorporates findings from studies completed since then, as well as a reanalysis of one earlier study. Based on that research, the report concludes, SFA has "positive" effects for teaching beginning readers alphabetics, "mixed" effects for its effectiveness at teaching comprehension, and "potentially positive" effects for improving students' general reading achievement. That rating is not much different from the evaluation that Success for All got the last time around but, by What Works' tough standards, it's practically glowing.

The news was not so good, though, for the Creative Curriculum for Preschool, a project-based program that aims to nurture the development of the "whole child." Based on the three studies involving 844 kids, the clearinghouse concluded that the program yields "no discernible effects" for improving young children's oral language, print knowledge, processing of phonemes (the sounds that make up words), or math skills. The report offered no judgments on the nonacademic skills that whole-child programs are also meant to nurture.

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In education, one of the hottest imports from Southeast Asia in recent years has been Singapore Math, a collection of textbooks developed by Singapore's Ministry of Education for use in that nation's schools. Pockets of educators and parents all around the United States rave about the books, which are also available for purchase here.

Slimmer and decidedly less flashy than the books that weigh down the backpacks of most U.S. students, the Singapore books provide more in-depth coverage of a smaller number of topics. For a more detailed treatment of what makes such an approach to math instruction so appealing, see this Education Week article from 2005.

The books' popularity also stems from Singapore students' consistent ranking at or near the top of the world on international math tests. After all, if Singapore students do so well year in and year out, the textbooks must be doing something right.

That's why it was a bit of a surprise yesterday when the What Works Clearinghouse posted a ho-hum review of the research on the Singapore Math curricula for middle school. The federal researchers analyzed 12 studies on the program that were conducted between 1983 and 2008 and found none that could pass its tough evidence screens.

The reviewers concluded:

The lack of studies meeting WWC evidence standards means that, at this time, the WWC is unable to draw any conclusions based on research about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of Singapore Math.

The clearinghouse reached the same non-conclusion two years ago when it reviewed the research on Singapore Math programs geared to elementary school students.

The new report's timing, though, may have been slightly impolitic. Only a week earlier, the education ministry hosted an event at the embassy of Singapore to showcase its approach to math education for educators and the media.

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We're going to have to stop calling the U.S. Department of Education's What Works Clearinghouse the "nothing works" clearinghouse.

Set up in 2002 to vet research on educational programs and practices, the clearinghouse got that unfortunate nickname because so few of its early reviews turned up educational interventions that were any more effective than what educators were already doing.

This new statistic from Mathematica Policy Research Inc., the Princeton, N.J., company that operates the clearinghouse, suggests that times have changed: Of the 100-plus reports now posted on the clearinghouse Web site, 62 percent have at least one outcome that's positive.

If you go to the Web site to see for yourself, check out the nifty new search tools. They can spit out charts showing you how all the interventions in a particular topic area—say, reading or dropout prevention—stack up against one another by What Works standards. You can also customize the results by grade level, student population, or the learning outcome that interests you.

With all those new bells and whistles, the clearinghouse ought to come up with a slogan—perhaps "put what works to work for you"—to bury the "nothing works" moniker once and for all.

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