I highly recommend this article by John McWhorter.
Back then, in the early ’70s, Siegfried Engelmann led a government-sponsored investigation called Project Follow Through. It compared nine teaching methods and tracked their results among 75,000 children from kindergarten through third grade. It found that the Direct Instruction (DI) method of teaching reading — based on sounding out words rather than learning them whole (phonics), and on a tightly scripted format emphasizing repetition and student participation — was vastly more effective than any of the others. And for poor kids. Including black ones.
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Decade after decade, DI has continued to kick serious butt all across this great land. Houston, Baltimore, Milwaukee — you name it; I am unaware of anywhere it hasn’t worked, and it’s hard to even choose one example as a demonstration. In 2001, students in the mostly black Richmond district in Virginia were scoring abysmally in reading. With a DI-style program, just four years later, three-quarters of black students passed the third-grade reading test. Meanwhile, over in wealthy Fairfax County, where DI was scorned, the minority of black students taking that test — despite ample funding — were passing it at the rate of merely 59 percent.
A handful of charter schools, like Charter Day School in Brunswick County and Franklin Academy Charter School in Wake County, use Direct Instruction, but do not expect to find it in many district school classrooms.
Do you want to know how the state feels about DI? Read “‘Direct instruction’ hangs up charter’s bid” in the November 2007 issue of Carolina Journal.
