Project Follow Through
…A
Billion Dollar Government Study
That
Education Bureaucrats Keep Trying
To Bury
What
if the federal government spent $1 billion
over nearly three decades to thoroughly
study the question of which teaching methods
best instill knowledge, cognitive skills,
and positive self-concept in students?
What if that study were able
to conclude exactly which method does all
three best? Wouldn't the American people
want to know about it?
Both the study and its conclusion
do exist. Project Follow Through, begun
in 1967 under President Lyndon Johnson's
War on Poverty to "follow through"
on Head Start, spent an estimated $1 billion
through the Office (now Department) of Education,
the Office of Economic Opportunity, and
dozens of private sponsors to test and evaluate
an array of educational methods.
A total of 700,000 students
in 170 socioeconomically disadvantaged communities
around the country were involved. Parents
were asked to decide which model would be
adopted at their school; the government
then funded the model through such sponsors
as universities and private institutes.
The last funds for the study-the
largest educational experiment ever undertaken-were
disbursed in 1995. What happened then is
another study--in the politics of bureaucracy,
says Douglas Carnine, professor of education
at the University of Oregon.
"The education
profession has never been particularly interested
in results, especially if they run counter
to the prejudices of the profession,"
says Mr. Carnine, who was involved with
Project Follow Through when his university
served as one of its sponsors.
Of the nine education methods
evaluated under Project Follow Through,
three each fell into one of three types:
- Basic skills--a semibehavioristic
approach similar to the Suzuki method
- Cognitive--a learning-to-learn
approach that stresses the child's discovery
or "construction" of knowledge
on his own
- Affective--a whole-child approach that
aims to boost student self-esteem on the
theory that a higher sense of self-worth
promotes achievement
By the mid-1970s, data on the
program had been gathered by Stanford Research
Institute and analyzed by Abt Associates
of Cambridge, Massachusetts. These data
were derived from a battery of five tests
administered to "cohorts" (followed
from either kindergarten through third grade
or first through third grade) of more than
9,000 Follow Through students matched with
a control group of 6,500 students from non-Follow
Through school sites.
The eleven "outcome measures"
assessed by these tests consisted of basics
such as spelling and computation, problem-solving
ability or cognition, and self-concept or
self-esteem (affective development)--a division
that happened to correspond to the three
approaches taken by the test models.
Direct instruction, one of
the basic skills approaches, showed the
greatest positive impact on all three types
of development.
Those methods aimed specifically
at improving cognition or boosting self-esteem
showed either negative average effects or
no average effect on all three types of
measure. This result anticipates later studies
that have shown "the dark side"
of efforts to found education upon self-esteem
rather than viewing self-esteem as an outgrowth
of acquiring proficiency at skills.
Direct Instruction (DI), coined
by Siegfried Engelmann in the early 1960s
as he taught his own children, is defined
by the researcher James Baumann: "The
teacher in a face to face, reasonably formal
manner, tells, shows, models, demonstrates,
and teaches the skill to be learned. The
key word is teacher, for it is the teacher
who is in command."
Gary Adams, co-author of "Research
on Direct Instruction," a recent evaluation
of DI, adds that "the difference is
the curriculum not so much the method. It's
the sequence of concepts presented that
matters. Not one other model has been field
tested to the extent this one has …
with very good teachers and very difficult
kids."
Skills such as reading, spelling,
and computation are presented step by step,
and reinforcement ensures that each child
has mastered one step before moving on to
the next.
In 1977, the Ford Foundation hired four
researchers to re-evaluate the Project Follow
Through data, which were showing the superiority
of Direct Instruction.
Published as "No Simple
Answer" in the Harvard Educational
Review, the re-evaluation by E. R. House,
GV. Glass, L.F. McLean, and D. F. Walker
argued that DI's superiority was not that
statistically significant if the analysis
was refocused; was due to environment rather
than to the method used; and that while
such a method might work for at-risk students,
it was not relevant to the needs of "normal"
students.
Bonnie Grossen, editor of the
journal Effective School Practices, replies
that ironically, the writers' "re-analysis
not only continued to show the much greater
strength of DI on all measures, but they
even proved how academically valid the measures
were."
"What they did was change
the question because they didn't like the
answer. Their argument was that we should
ignore the question of what leads to better
academic learning. So they essentially gave
people permission to ignore the whole point
of the project."
"It's hard to figure out
why they would do such a thing," she
muses.
After the Harvard article appeared,
all the text models were recommended equally
for dissemination to the school districts,
and by 1982, the least-effective models
were receiving higher levels of funding
than the most effective ones, in an apparent
effort to equalize results.
Deputy Secretary of Education
Marshall "Mike" Smith was involved
with Project Follow Through at Harvard during
the early 1970s.
The program "was a very
ambitious effort to try and understand how
children learn," he recalls. "We
found out how difficult it is to change
the schools to make them more effective."
Were the findings swept under
the rug, as critics claim? "Oh, I think
that's wrong. There wasn't just one finding
that came out of Follow Through. There was
a general finding that highly structured
classes focused on basic skills produced
better results on basic skills tests."
"The world of the classroom
is a pretty complicated place," concludes
Mr. Smith, a former dean of education at
Stanford University. "This is difficult
stuff."
The president of the National
Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Gail
Burrill, was asked about Project Follow
Through in a recent interview and responded,
"I have never heard of it" (Notices
of the American Mathematical Society, January
1998).
Mr. Adams shakes his head.
"The most puzzling thing is how the
very models, like whole language and discovery
learning, that the data showed to be ineffective
and even harmful are still being pushed.
Parents should be asking, "Where is
the proof these programs work?'"
"Instead, the screaming
only starts when the awful test results
come in," Mr. Adams says.
Source--Washington
Times article, March 24, 1998, by Marian
Kester Cooms
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