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Seebach: Education elite strangle a superior program

Published February 24, 2007 at midnight

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I've been reading one of the most important education books you'll likely never have a chance to read. It's by Siegfried Engelmann, and it's about Direct Instruction, the structured curriculum he began to develop in the early 1960s, how DI participated in a federal study called Project Follow Through, and how the results of that study - which demonstrated that DI produced superior outcomes for at-risk children - were essentially disappeared from the educational landscape by hostile educators and bureaucrats.

Zig's latest book is titled The Outrage of Project Follow Through: 5 Million Failed Kids Later, and the reason you will probably never get a chance to read it is that he hasn't been able to get it published. So he decided to put it up on his Web site, zigsite.com, a chapter at a time, each chapter up for just two weeks. You can read Chapters 4 and 5 today, and if you're interested in why American education is so ineffective, and so resistant to any improvement, you should go right now and read Chapter 5, which chronicles how DI's disappearance was accomplished.

"The truth about Follow Through was silently drowned like an unwanted kitten, and nobody protested," Zig says.

Follow Through was a response to the fact that early evaluations of Head Start suggested its effects disappeared within a year or two. The original idea was to extend how long Head Start children could receive services - hence the name - but, in the event, there wasn't enough money to do that so the project was changed into a research study.

"Follow Through would identify proponents of different approaches and would set the stage for something like a horse race, in which there would be a winner or winners, some also-rans, and some losers. The study would involve over 200,000 students, 22 sponsors of different approaches, and 178 communities, which spanned the full range of demographic setting variables (rural, urban) and ethnic composition (white, not-white; poor, not-poor; English, non-English).

Parents' groups chose among the models, and DI turned out to be far more popular with parents than it was among professional educators. Zig's team was responsible for 39 schools in 19 communities. The models started in 1968 with a cohort of kindergartners, if the schools had a kindergarten, and added a grade each year up to grade 3. After full implementation, 40,000 children were tested.

When the results were analyzed, Direct Instruction had won the horse race going away. It was first in basic skills, but it was also the only model that had positive results on all three higher-order cognitive skills, and it was also first in affective measures, how children feel about themselves. It was first with high performers and with low performers, with different ethnic groups and with non-English speakers. After DI training, teachers were able to get even very low-performing children reading by the end of kindergarten.

Would you expect people to adopt a demonstrably superior program? Education doesn't work that way, if evidence contradicts its deeply held pieties, devoted to Saints Dewey and Piaget. Since the wrong horse had won, the race had to be canceled retroactively. The spin was that, on average, Follow Through students did no better than comparable Title I students, so there was no point in comparing results of different models.

You've never heard of Direct Instruction? You've never heard of Project Follow Through? Zig tells you why.

Linda Seebach is an editorial writer for the Rocky. She can be reached by telephone at (303) 954-2519 or by e-mail at .