The fourth episode of the second season of Sold a Story looks at a poor, Black neighborhood in Houston, where Principal Thaddeus Lott transformed a struggling elementary school with Direct Instruction and laments that critics doubted his amazing results:
Wesley hadn’t become the best school in Houston. There were still about 20 schools — all with higher income populations — that were scoring better than Wesley. But Wesley was doing better than some schools in wealthy, white neighborhoods. And no school with as many kids from poor families was performing anywhere close.
Gayle Fallon, who was the head of the Houston teacher’s union, appeared in an interview with Chris Wallace of ABC News in 1991:
Chris Wallace: Why the suspicion?
Fallon: I think they suspect them because they are poor, Black children and because in the mindset in the administration they don’t believe poor, Black children can outperform suburban white children. And they are doing it. And they are doing it routinely.
Wallace: Ms. Fallon, you’re, you’re making a very serious charge.
Fallon: Right.
Wallace: You’re basically accusing the school district, the top administrators, of racism.
Fallon: Yes. I think probably racism of the worst kind. You know, it’s not even conscious racism. It’s a racism of lowering your expectations for minority students.
Raymond: That’s totally fallacious. It’s absolutely not true.
We’re supposed to be indignant that anyone would be skeptical of a school suddenly wildly outperforming its history.
The fifth episode covers what makes Direct Instruction effective:
There have been hundreds of studies since Project Follow Through. Direct Instruction is now one of the most researched education programs out there.
And there’s another body of research that’s relevant. Cognitive science — research on how people learn.
That science was still relatively new when Direct Instruction was first being developed.
But a lot of what Zig and his colleagues built into their programs lines up remarkably well with what cognitive scientists later figured out.
[…]
The idea is that a teacher can communicate something so clearly that students will learn what you want them to learn.
Zig and Doug had a name for this: Faultless communication.
[…]
You have to be really clear, so kids learn what you’re trying to teach them.
But you can’t teach kids everything. There’s not enough time in the school day for that.
And you don’t need to teach kids everything.
You need to give kids a foundation, so they can learn things you haven’t taught them.
[…]
Kids figuring things out on their own. You’ve heard that before.
That’s the goal of discovery learning — for kids to become independent learners.
Zig wanted kids to become independent learners too.
The disagreement was about how kids get there.
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An expert already knows a lot about a topic. When they encounter something new, they have knowledge to draw on. They can connect the dots. Come up with insights and ideas of their own.
That’s what Carl wanted his students to do. He wanted them to think like experts.
But they weren’t. They were still beginners.
[…]
His students needed to know more.
And the cognitive science research he was reading kept pointing to the benefits of teaching things directly. Especially for beginners. And especially for certain kinds of knowledge.
[…]
Jean and her team went through all the studies they’d found. They excluded some for things like poor research design. Took the more than 300 studies that were left and calculated what is known as an “effect size.”
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The average overall effect size for Direct Instruction across all the studies was .56.
That might not sound like a big number. But it’s a big number in the land of education and effect sizes. Researchers generally consider an effect size of .25 to be educationally significant.
Direct Instruction’s average effect size was more than twice that.
[…]
Several of the studies tracked students for years. In some cases, from elementary school all the way through high school. And students who’d had Direct Instruction were still doing better.
That kind of staying power is unusual. A lot happens to a student as they move through school — different teachers, different classes. But years later, the Direct Instruction advantage was still there.
And Direct Instruction worked for all kinds of students. Not just kids in special education. Not just kids in certain racial or ethnic groups. Not just kids from low-income families.