Big Think

Robert Sperry commented on Wendy Kopp Discusses Educational Inequity on September 12, 2009, 5:16 AM

The department of education ran a large study called Project Follow Through that demonstrated that an instructional method called Direct  Instruction can take an existing public Title 1 school from the  bottom 20% and move it to the 50% in a broad range of student  achievement metrics.  The DI folk did this with about 44 schools and  sustained it for 8+ years, and they did this without hire/fire  ability over teachers.  Contrary to TFA the solution is not to get  ivy graduates to make stuff up as they go along, but to carefully  engineer the curriculum and interaction between the teacher and the  students so that the vast majority of teachers can succeed in  educating students. And to have quality control feed back loops to  correct problems when they develop. http://www.zigsite.com/PDFs/chapter5-6intro.pdf TFA is not about solving educational inequality.  Look at their web  site and notice how many jobs they have open for engineering better  educational practices (I found none) versus jobs for people to raise  money and angle for political power (lots).  TFA is an attempt to transfer the IVY model of group loyalty to a  organization that wants to gain political power over education.  By  this I mean they get top motivated people tell them they are doing  great important things and make them work really hard so they feel  invested...and oh when you go get wealthy and powerful or just get  your inheritance remember us and give us some. The proof is in the data, DI has it, TFA does not.  Go look at thier  site for longitunical data that says they can boost student  performance on a large scale.  They have none, what they do have is a  bunch of great stories about impressive people that do things that  aren't scalable.  Their inspiration is Stand and Deliver.. what  happened to that teacher and his program?  How long did it last after  he left the school?  Why didn't it spread to every school?  If your  educational solution requires 140+ IQ teachers working 80+ hours a  week for nominal money, then congratulations you have an inherently  non-scalable program. So the question is why is DI not being used in under-performing  schools? My belief is that its a function of the political systems  drive to reduce its accountability, and DI requires accountability. Education indeed has deep problems.  But the problem is not  discovering how to teach children or get them to learn at grade  level.  DI solves that problem (though no doubt in can be continuously improved).   The deep problem is how do you get entrenched power structures to accept accountability and place improved performance as one of their goals (not just increasing their power and vanity)