from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:
Later, I began teaching injured workers who required upgrading so they could change their careers to one requiring intellectual rather than physical work. In one study we showed that a grade gain of one year in mathematics could be produced with an average of 19.9 hours of instruction.
Similar powerful results have been produced by others. Johnson and Layng, at the Morningside Academy in Seattle, have created large changes in the academic behavior of children who have been "diagnosed" with attention deficit disorder, dyslexia, etc. They accomplished similar results with untaught adults from the slums of a large American city.
One of the impressive things about Morningside is the attention that these "attention disordered" children pay to their work. I was in a classroom for an hour and a half as an observer. There were 16 students and about as many teachers who were learning Morningside teaching methods. The room was noisy, mostly from the adults, although there was some Direct Instruction choral responding going on. I observed the students, who were working in 5 different groups, mainly on their own, to see how much time was wasted. The only non-academic behavior I saw was a 13-14 year old boy trying to attract a girl’s attention for about 20 sec. When she ignored him, he went back to work. All of these students had been labelled as having attention deficit disorder or dyslexia or both. Perhaps their eight weeks of summer school had cured their supposed neurological disability in some magical way.
Thaddeus Lott was principal at Wesley Elementary School in Houston Texas, a school in an impoverished area. Using Direct Instruction, he raised the percentage of 3rd graders passing the district criteria for reading from 18% to 85%. In another school under Lott’s direction, the pass rate for fourth year math went from 30 to 90%. This is impressive not only for where it was accomplished but for the fact that Wesley excluded a far smaller percentage of "special need students" than other schools. Some proponents of Whole Language and even officials within the school district accused Lott of cheating, a charge which was demonstrated to be groundless. Lott attributed the investigation to the "Whole Language groupies" which then dominated. The accusers could not grasp the fact that something works so much better than their theories although these theories are taught in actual faculties of education.
Lott did many things to achieve these results. He used an effective, scientifically-based curriculum (Direct Instruction). He trained and monitored teachers carefully. One of his observations was that newly graduated teachers do not learn to teach effectively in teacher’s colleges. Cult members only learn cultish behavior which has nothing to do with reality or effectiveness.
The social services, of which teaching is a part, have always been subject to fads because they are still in the pre-scientific stage of development. Whole Language, for example, was widely accepted before the data dictated acceptance and naturally, a disaster ensued. Steven Stahl, who published two review articles on Whole Language, concluded that Whole Language instruction is as effective as instruction using basal readers although Direct Instruction is far superior to both. To do as well as basal readers is still not a proud boast. The Whole Language debacle is a classic example of what happens when methods are chosen "theory-down" rather than "data-up". There is a better way. Science in the social services always leads practice by several decades. It’s time practice caught up, but it will not until we choose methods rationally on the basis of results and not by whether we "feel good" about them based on some intuitive, and always mistaken, notion of how students learn. The way things are done in education are so ludicrous that the solutions cause more problems than the solutions they displace.
Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
