Operation Follow Through

You may have never heard of “Operation Follow Through.” It was the largest educational experiment ever performed. It cost a billion dollars. It involved 700,000 students. Yet it remains obscure, and none of its recommendations have been implemented.

Part of Lyndon Johnson's “War on Poverty,” the idea for Follow Through was to test all of the popular theories of education at that time—the mid-sixties—to discover which would best boost the scores of disadvantaged children in the early school years. Saving them, ultimately, from a life of poverty.

A wide range of test schools were assigned nine different teaching approaches. Each also had a “control” school with similar demographics and in which no trial was being held. Eleven different measures of outcome were used, grouped into three categories: improvements in basic skills (the three Rs), improvements in cognitive skills (i.e., ability to reason), and improvements in affective skills (e.g., good old “self-esteem” and ability to cooperate with others). This was by mutual agreement of the advocates of the various systems: of the approaches, three broadly stressed basic skills, three stressed cognitive skills, and three took an affective approach.

The results were, surprisingly, quite clear. All three approaches stressing affective skills scored poorly—worse than the controls. They scored worse even on affective skills. Stressing self-esteem simply doesn't work—least of all to build self-esteem. Two of the three approaches stressing cognitive skills also scored worse than the controls—including on developing cognitive skills. One just about broke even—still no better than letting the average classroom teacher do his or her own thing. Two of the three approaches stressing basic skills similarly about broke even—they did well on affective measures, badly on cognitive, and were a wash on basic skills.

This is already rather alarming—the best that all the educational theorists in America seem able to do is no worse than the average classroom teacher. And that's the exception.

But that is not the end of the story. One basic skills approach was clearly superior—superior on all measures. It did better than any other approach, and the control, for teaching basic skills. It did better for developing cognitive skills. It did better for developing affective skills.

It was called “direct instruction.”

We must be careful here—all data from the social sciences is shaky. We know from the study only that this approach works best with most disadvantaged children in the early grades. It does not follow that it would work best with students in the later grades, or with advanced students, or even that it would work best with all disadvantaged students. In fact, one striking result of this study was that the success of all methods varied widely by school.

However, it is still remarkable that this study has resulted in no change in public policy, no change in educational theory, no change in teacher education, and no general move to adopt the winning technique.

There are, I believe, two reasons for this. First, Direct Instruction was the only model tested that did not come from a Faculty of Education. It did not even come from a trained teacher. It was developed by an ad executive who originally created it to teach his own children.

This was pretty embarassing for all the education experts. It also threatened their livelihoods.

But more importantly, with Direct Instruction, trained teachers were not necessary. As the approach's web site boasts even today, with DI, anyone can teach successfully. It hands the teacher a script, and all he or she has to do is follow it.

Good-bye to the teaching profession, at least at this level. They apparently have nothing of value to sell, to justify their pay or status. In fact, they are probably standing in the way of a good education.

This of course explains why the teaching establishment so hates school choice. A school using Direct Instruction could produce better results for less money, simply by avoiding “qualified” teachers.

The bottom line: the fastest way to improve education would probably be to close all the Faculties of Education, and to stop recognizing their degrees. Qualifications for teaching should be qualifications in the subject being taught.