The Sabotage of Public Education

The secrets of successful schools are hiding in plain sight. The problem is that our Education Establishment refuses to implement those ideas.

January 10, 2021 By Bruce Deitrick Price

Genuine rigorous testing of educational ideas is rare in America. Why? Because practical testing usually goes against what the professors want to do. Their impractical ideas don't perform well in the real world. 

For example, Operation Follow-Through was the biggest, most systematic testing in American education, continuing for ten years, 1967 to 1977. 

This research showed absolutely that common sense, often called Direct Instruction, works best. Quite simply, that's where a teacher teaches, and students learn. Honest educators would say, okay, that's what works best. Let's use it. Our educators said no such thing, which is shocking. 

After all, Follow-Through was a government project. It should have been conducted in an honorable way. But the professors in charge reneged on their promise that the method that won the ten-year competition would be implemented across the country. Education professors further launched a nasty campaign defaming Direct Instruction and its creator, Siegfried Engelmann (1931–2019). .........

The U.S. has had three giants in education: John Saxon in the teaching of math, Rudolf Flesch in the teaching of reading, and Siegfried Engelmann in routine instruction across all subjects. The fascinating pattern throughout K–12 is that the Education Establishment expends vast energy and budgets trying to con Americans into accepting what is clearly inferior........... To Read More