Daria Doering

War Against the Schools’ Academic Child Abuse

By Siegfried Engelmann

I think my first exposure to Direct Instruction came through reading an article in the L.A. Times about two California schools that stood out as successes among the landscape of failing schools.  Both of these schools had rejected a wide number of “reforms” such as bilingual education, whole language, and student-centered learning.

Main features of direct instruction:

• Field tested
• Motto is: “If the student hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught.”
• Fast paced
• Five times the “practice” as in other programs
• Fluency in all skills is vital.
• Continual review.
• Unambiguous examples.
• Group oral response by students
• Whole class instruction followed by students applying and extending the concepts in small groups
• Lessons must be mastered before moving on.
• Programs are scripted, which saves the teachers time in writing lesson plans, and in time the teachers have memorized the script and present it in their own way.  Teachers need to either all be instructional designers, or have their lessons scripted by instructional designers.
• Carefully sequenced and structured
• Teaching sub-strategies.
• Constant assessment.
• Mastery of basic material; then applying it to different situations or problems
• Teacher training focuses on where teachers could make mistakes with the scripted program: pacing, reinforcement, challenging, correcting errors, and managing.
• A competent program will work for all kids, regardless of their aptitude, achievement level, SES or learning style.  P. 85

Main problems in education:

• Lack of field testing.  Introducing wholesale reforms without seeing if they work.
• Philosophy before data.  Lack of paying attention to data by legislators and administrators.
  • Constructivism (relativism)
  • Egalitarianism
• Rule of the majority or rule by committee – when the majority doesn’t know what it’s doing.
• Lack of acknowledgment of the failure of progressive education.
  • Renorming of SAT’s
  • College graduates know about the same as previous high school graduates.
• Textbook publishing process.  Nothing is field tested on kids.  The idea is to make money by coming up with what the buyers want, and that’s it.
• Treating teachers as instruction designers.  Success in education is driven more by curriculum than teachers.
• Lack of sequencing.  Notion that beginning skills do not need to be learned before advanced skills.
• Hostility to teaching “basic skills” at all, which really boils down to hostility to teaching at all.  Where are kids going to get the “prior knowledge” with which to connect new knowledge if not from being taught?
• Hostility to “following the rules.”  Constructivists don’t like following the rules of math, or following the hierarchy of Bloom’s Taxonomy needed to learn other disciplines.
• If children of all abilities should be grouped together, why not group students of different ages together?  Why the “ageism”?
• The educational system is sick because virtually everyone in it lacks technical understanding of the one thing that is the point of education: instruction.
• “The more people read about education, the more they become indoctrinated by the theories and approaches that are at the heart of the schools’ failure.”  (p. 14)
• Nonsense ideas, such as:
  • “Skills don’t need to be learned in order”; that higher-order thinking skills can precede lower-order ones.
  • Reading based on prior discussion, prediction, looking at pictures, guessing … Books need to be discussed, predicted and so on before being read.
• Spiral education – notion that it benefits students to be “exposed to” material without mastering it.
• Those at the top of the educational bureaucracy are incompetent.  They are both naïve and arrogant.  They are naïve because they have never taught successfully or seen it done.  They are arrogant because they are convinced they know the answers, and impose failing strategies on kids.
• No acknowledgement that kids may wind up in “special education” because of defects in curriculum or instruction.  It’s not even considered as a possibility.  The truth is that the explosive growth in the field is “special education” is a direct result of defective curriculum, not defective or “different” children.
• What makes instruction effective is generally not large issues, but small technical details that are picked up through field testing (p. 19).
• Developmental theory, which sounds so humane, but actually is used to hold kids back.
• Floating standards.
• “Studies show that teachers do better when supervised regularly … To let teachers alone in the classroom is to acknowledge that the kids are not the most important aspect of the schools.”  (p. 64)
• “The arrogance of many administrators is not apparent in their personalities.  They may appear thoughtful, concerned, and open to suggestions.  Their arrogance is in their decisions and their actions.” (p. 66)
• Circular reasoning – schools are failing, yet they will no consider any programs that are outside of parameters they have established, which led to the failure in the first place.
• “Constructivists” are actually the same as “cognitivists.”
• Site-based governance does not work.  It was tried in Operation Follow Through (p. 135)
• Teachers are taught general principles rather than specific skills (p. 156) in teaching school.
• It is thought to be more important that teachers be “nurturing” than to teach.

Daria’s thoughts:

• It’s unbelievable how corrupt the field of education is.  There is nothing else like it.  Education is so important that it has an unparalleled effect on people’s lives.  At the same time, it is done in a way that is unparalleled in incompetence.
• The degree of professional jealousy in the fields of education, at all levels, is above that in any other field, I would guess.  At least in other fields, competition is expected, and is fairly open and accepted.  In business, the name of the game is who can make the most money.  In science, the point is to make the greatest discoveries and inventions.   But in the field of education, there is this fantasy that professionals are altruistically motivated, and that there’s something wrong with competition.  This is so wrongheaded.  Competition between schools, and open competition between teachers, is exactly what is needed.  As it is, what you get psychologically is this state of denial; teachers and professors who are unconscionable cutthroats, but are denying the whole thing.  What you get in practice is teachers trying to prevent assessment, prevent competition, prevent merit pay, drag each other down to the lowest level, and take potshots at anyone who excels.
• The field of education reminds me of “whole language.”  When I was little, I was taught by the “look say” method, and had reading problems.  I remember thinking – do I really have to memorize each word?  Don’t these letters stand for anything?  Isn’t there a better way?                                                                                                                  Similarly, in education, I have the reaction of, “Do I really have to write my own lesson plans for each lesson?  Hasn’t somebody already done this?  Isn’t there a better way?”  My other reaction was, “Aren’t I going to be taught how to teach?  Things like delivery, pacing, being dramatic, public speaking?”
• There’s nothing better than a well-presented lecture, along with a graphic organizer, and time for students to process the information.
• There’s something I don’t understand between behaviorism vs. cognitivism … Maybe I don’t want to understand it.  The relevant thing, I think, is that behaviorism focuses on results, while cognitivism focuses on factors that are in people’s minds and not measurable … schema, etc.  The theories behind both of them are merely theories.

Specific Topics

• Math manipulatives are not the best way to teach, because they allow more misinterpretations than symbols do.
• Kids need to be taught “translation skills” of going from word problems to symbol problems.
• Comparing schools to factories is not a bad analogy.  P. 162