Prologue to
Teaching Needy Kids in Our Backward System
Chapter 5

Chapter 5 | Contents & Forward |
For Readers Not Familiar With Project Follow Through |

I put Chapter 5 of Teaching Needy Kids in Our Backward System online for two reasons:

It provides indisputable evidence that DI outperformed all other 21 models of instructing at-risk children in Project Follow Through; and

It might spark some interest in DI outside the DI community by suggesting that we know something about teaching kids effectively and that we don’t destroy kids or their teachers.

A synopsis of the Follow Through evaluation is that the Feds recognized DI as the winning model, but didn’t disseminate information about DI because it was the only winning model. So even though DI showed that it could greatly accelerate the performance of at-risk students, and even though the evaluation cost $30 million, the Feds lied about Follow Through and simply asserted that Follow Through failed (which they interpreted to mean that all the models failed).

Millions of needy kids have been robbed of career ladders by the Feds' decisions. Millions of teachers have been professionally insulted because information about DI practices never reached them or the unfortunate educators who trained them.

But it happened, and this chapter presents letters from the people who made the decisions, showing that they not only understood that DI was the undisputed winner in reading, math, language, spelling, self-images, and measures of self-reliance, but used these facts as their justification for not acknowledging DI. Sound insane? Read the chapter.

As a bonus, we’ve included a snippet from Chapter 6. It shows that the lying and deception was not a momentary lapse of the Feds, but a deliberate part of a plan to perpetuate a very sick system, which prevails in full regalia today.

Featured Video

Kindergarteners Showing Off Their Math Skills 1966 Uncut demonstration of at-risk children who were taught math by Zig Engelmann as four year olds and five year olds. The session was filmed in front of a class of college students in August with no rehearsal. Children work addition, subtraction, multiplication, division problems, basic algebra problems, fraction problems, area problems, factoring, and simple simultaneous equations.