Siegfried Engelmann is publishing a new book, The Outrage of Project Follow Through: 5 million failed kids later, and it will initially (but only temporarily) be available via the Internet. An anonymous friend sent me this information:
Every week for the next seven weeks, starting Jan 22, Zig will post one chapter of the unpublished trade book he has just written. Each chapter will remain on http://zigsite.com for two weeks. Once it’s off, it’s off and will not return. There are seven chapters.
- Before Project Follow Through (Jan 22)
- Project Follow Through Begins (Jan 29)
- Follow Through continues (Feb 5)
- During Follow Through (Feb 12)
- Follow Through Evaluation (Feb 19)
- Follow Through Aftermath (Feb 26)
- The New Millennium (Mar 5)
You may download chapters, but understand that the material is copyrighted by Zig and is not to be distributed or published without Zig’s consent.
All chapters except the one on evaluation are at least 80 pages. The book is not designed for educators but for the general public. The events start in 1964, when Zig got his first job in education (at the Institute for Research on Exceptional Children at the University of Illinois) and proceeds from there to the present through a series of first-person vignettes and episodes that present the human side of what Zig and his collegues did and why they did it. The book delivers a powerful message in showing how DI was shaped by evidence on how teachers and kids performed.
Many episodes are dramatic. Together, they show that those involved in the DI Follow Through model knew what they were talking about because they had done more than theorize or observe through the sterile literature. They were completely involved in working with teachers, kids and schools for more than 20 years in different manifestations of Follow Through. The book also provides short tours of work Zig and his collegues have done with various types of learners, from autistic, those with traumatic brain damage, and deaf, to preschoolers, at-risk high school students, and the gifted.
The theme of the book is that urban school districts, as they are currently configured, can’t possibly work because their structure, logic, and philosophy are anti-scientific. Overall, the book will probably sadden you, but hopefully, it will provide an interesting journey and won’t discourage you.
I’m going to post reminders each day that a new chapter appears.
I sent you an email to this effect, but it might be useful to put it here, too:
What do you think of Charles Murray’s claim
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.25452,filter.all/pub_detail.asp
Some say that the public schools are so awful that there is huge room for improvement in academic performance just by improving education. There are two problems with that position. The first is that the numbers used to indict the public schools are missing a crucial component. For example, in the 2005 round of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 36% of all fourth-graders were below the NAEP’s “basic achievement” score in reading. It sounds like a terrible record. But we know from the mathematics of the normal distribution that 36% of fourth-graders also have IQs lower than 95.
What IQ is necessary to give a child a reasonable chance to meet the NAEP’s basic achievement score? Remarkably, it appears that no one has tried to answer that question. We only know for sure that if the bar for basic achievement is meaningfully defined, some substantial proportion of students will be unable to meet it no matter how well they are taught. As it happens, the NAEP’s definition of basic achievement is said to be on the tough side. That substantial proportion of fourth-graders who cannot reasonably be expected to meet it could well be close to 36%.