Sunday, January 09, 2005
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

LITERACY FAILURES: Schools shun what works

Extensive research project insulted academics

For more than a quarter century a deepening crisis in reading achievement has engulfed Nevada's public schools.

Yet a look back into history clearly shows that, for all that time, Nevada's literacy learning crisis, like the one afflicting America generally, has been entirely unnecessary.

Project Follow Through was a research project started by the Johnson administration. Its goal was to find the best educational methods for breaking the cycle of poverty.

Still today, Project Follow Through remains the world's largest scientific education-research experiment. Despite not officially ending until 1995, by 1976 it had produced exceedingly clear findings.

The project worked like this: Architects of various educational approaches were invited to submit applications and serve as sponsors for model projects. After some 22 educational approaches were selected for testing, parent groups from schools that served kids from poor families were allowed to select the model that their school, for the next several years, would follow.

Eventually, more than 70,000 kindergarten through third grade students from some 180 American schools, both rural and urban, participated in the project. The students learned to read through the various educational approaches being tested, then were followed through succeeding years with additional tests and measurements.

The final Follow Through report showed that 20 of the models were outright failures. Virtually all of those approaches to teaching reading were developed by university education/school academics and based on the educational dogmas of John Dewey and Jean Piaget.

The one clear winner of the trial -- the only model that brought children close to the 50th percentile in all subject areas -- was a model called Direct Instruction. Developed by a preschool teacher from Illinois, it was subsequently sponsored by the then-tiny University of Oregon.

Although the results of Project Follow Through were clear, the U.S. education establishment fled from those results in conspicuous panic. The Ford Foundation hastened to do an evaluation suggesting it was inappropriate to even ask which model worked best. Then a co-author of that particular white paper wrote another report, this one for the then-Carter administration. He argued -- bizarrely, given the quantitative scientific underpinnings of the entire Follow Through project -- that "The deficiencies of quantitative, experimental evaluation approaches are so thorough and irreparable as to disqualify their use."

Finally, the Carter administration, deep in political hock to the National Education Association and eager to retain its support through the coming Democratic primaries, chose to not even disseminate the results of Project Follow Through. This, even though the federal government had paid some $40 million to learn precisely what the project had proven, and though the quality of life of millions of youngsters was at stake.

Today, new research projects continue to show that Direct Instruction and phonics produce results far superior to those of the Deweyite and Piaget-ish ed-school theorists. Yet the education establishment remains deeply wedded to its failing methodologies and openly hostile to those ratified by scientific measurement.

To justify such hostility, the educational bigfeet extend their antagonism to objective science itself, opting instead for subjective and "descriptive" studies. It's a ploy that allows them to willfully ignore results that do not flatter the methodologies their ideologies may anoint.

The University of Oregon's Douglas Carnine sees this as symptomatic of a field that has not yet matured into a true profession. From his post at the National Center to Improve the Tools of Educators, he notes a parallel between education today and medicine before outside pressures compelled doctors to adhere to rigorous science.

"In education, the judgments of 'experts' frequently appear to be unconstrained and sometimes altogether unaffected by objective research," writes Carnine. "Many of these experts are so captivated by romantic ideas about learning or so blinded by ideology that they have closed their minds to the results of rigorous experiments. Until education becomes the kind of profession that reveres evidence, we should not be surprised to find its experts dispensing unproven methods, endlessly flitting from one fad to another. The greatest victims of these fads are the very students who are most at risk."

In public education there is always much chin music about teaching as a profession. But for the field to actually achieve that condition its practitioners -- like those of medicine -- will have to follow empirical science, rather than ideological rationalizations for professorial and teacher self-indulgence.

Today, increasing public understanding of the real state of government-funded education is building ever-greater pressures for genuine reform.

Thus, genuine professionalism does lie ahead -- preceded, however, by a great shakeout.

Steven Miller is policy director for the Nevada Policy Research Institute.