Grantcoulson's Blog

from the Book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:

    Why do government workers have business cards that are modeled after those from free enterprise? It gives me an eery feeling to look at one.

    Now for some data on teaching. These data are old, well-known and ignored by every public educational organization. A then-president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Gail Burrill was asked about Project Follow Through, the largest systematic educational experiment ever, done under the Uptopian aegis of the Great Society where all problems were to be fixed by wise, government intervention.

    “This is from–Notices of the American Mathematical Society– “Starting in 1968, the government funded a huge study called Project Follow-Through. It cost a billion dollars and ran almost thirty years. The purpose was to examine how different teaching methods or philosophies affected student performance. What they found was that the traditional, "direct instruction" method was the most effective. Are you familiar with this study?”

Burrill: “I have never heard of it.”

    Burrill was, and maybe is, a teacher in a government school, capable of meeting the requirements of her job without knowledge of effective teaching.

    Project Follow Through was based on the horse racing model of research which pitted various methods against one another to see which would win. The notion being that the winner, especially a clear winner, would be widely disseminated and the losers forgotten. This notion was wrong because the opposite occurred. Direct Instruction won and is rarely used while the losers are widely used. The reason is, you guessed it,  contingencies and incentives for success. In public education there are no incentives for success, but many for good intentions, so whatever is done, it must be smothered in spin and feel-good. Government workers remind me of chronically losing sports teams, characterized by arrogant incompetence.

    The first graph shows the outcomes from Direct Instruction and a few of the other methods. The schools chosen all had terrible results before the experiment, hence the baseline is at the 20th percentile. Many of the methods did poorer than standard teaching which takes some doing.

    The second graph is more of a summary with the surprising result that Direct Instruction scored highest on the “self-esteem” test in spite of some other models relentlessly pounding self-esteem. Confidence comes from competence.

    Thanks to union activity, and relentless lobbying from other special interest groups, schools have become a place where adults are paid, not where children are taught.

    In Ontario, Canada, the jurisdiction in which I live, Direct Instruction is not used in public education. The first reason is that all of the assumptions or educational myths, which I have only begun to enumerate, are opposite of the assumptions which animate Direct Instruction. The second is that only textbooks published in Ontario are used in Ontario. I smell successful lobbying resulting in rent-seeking  (I will explain later, but not today) and rent-acceptance from textbook makers because it’s more important to support local textbook publishers than give children useful material.

Cheerio and ttfn,

Grant Coulson

This entry was posted on October 1, 2009 at 11:39 am and is filed under Psychology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.