it works. No other educational reform strays
further from accepted theory, differs more from
accepted practice, or draws such brutal slander
for its achievements.
bet, le$ er sounds, and math, or assess their academic skills. Teachers in all grades are warned that it is unjust and harmful to group students by skill level to instruct them in skills (because all children are equal and because children learn as much from one another as they do from adults). Math teachers are taught that kids will like math be$ er and be be$ er at it if they are made to fi gure out their own strate-gies to solve problems, rather than learn standard procedures from the teacher.
Engelmann’s methods explode this entire constellation of myth: children do not construct their own reality about subject ma$ ers; teachers need not wait for chil-dren to reach a certain age or stage of development before teaching them certain concepts; children do not learn more when teachers teach them less.
Rather than abandon their beliefs (and the lucrative investment in textbooks, training and curricula that express them), rather than honestly examine Engel-mann’s ideas and methods, DI’s detractors have manufactured another stock of myths to justify their rejection of DI.
◊ They say DI does not teach higher order skills—reading comprehension, for example, or algebra (of course, many of DI’s curricula are designed to do just that, and Engelmann can prove that they work).
◊ They say DI uses “drill and kill” methods that destroy the love of learning (a visit to a DI class is enough to discredit this claim).
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◊ They say DI ignores individual diff erences among students (but in fact Engelmann can specifi cally demonstrate that DI works for all kinds of stu-dents).
◊ They say DI only works for low performers and the poor, not the gifted and the middle class (again, disproved by tests and studies and by simple logic:
methods that work for low performers will work for high performers—it’s the reverse that’s not true).
◊ They say DI turns li$ le kids into robots (certainly not evident in class!) and older boys into criminals (a discredited claim instigated by the author of a rival program).
Engelmann’s success also discredits another popular myth: that teachers al-ways know best how to teach their kids, hence should be given wide latitude in the classroom. Critics say the scripted presentations limit teacher creativity and can become boring to teach. But in fact Engelmann’s programs are designed to free teachers from having to reinvent the wheel for every class and subject, and to let them focus on the give-and-take with students—which is rarely boring or predict-able. Many teachers are relieved that they don’t have to be responsible for course
design and lesson plans, on top of all their duties in the classroom.
“DI frees you up to do the fun stuff ,” says one teacher. “If you’re a creative person, you can be creative with DI,” says another. “I was creative for 17 years. But I wasn’t reaching all my students until I had this structure.”
And of course DI teachers get to experience that ultimate reward, the thing that makes it all worthwhile, the reason they became teachers in the fi rst place: the suc-cess, trust, and indeed love of their students.
No amount of data or teacher testimonial has been able to stop the criticisms of DI or the fl ow of dollars—billions of taxpayer dollars—to the critics and their own doctrines about how kids learn. This despite the fact that the critics have no scien-tifi c backing or proof that their own methods work—quite the opposite: fi fty years of lagging student achievement in America has proven their ideas to be failures.
Engelmann thinks the education system needs improvement, but he thinks
“DI frees you up to do the fun stuff,” says one
teacher. “If you’re a creative person, you can be
creative with DI,” says another. “I was creative
for 17 years. But I wasn’t reaching all my students
until I had this structure.”
forms such as “No Child Left Behind” are doomed to fail because they don’t re-fl ect, much less require, any technical understanding of what goes on in the class-room; hence they cannot really evaluate the success or failure of teaching methods.
“If you come in with anything that has specifi cs and requires technical training and objective, easily identifi ed criteria, educators will oppose it,” he says. It’s as if a team of civil engineers were trying to build a bridge across a deep canyon but refused to use steel beams or an
architect’s plan to show how they should be put together.
“You can walk into a Direct In-struction classroom and tell right away if anything’s wrong. You can see whether the teacher is do-ing it the right way, whether the kids are placed right. It is all very obvious,” Engelmann says. “And that is absolutely opposed to the educational idioms of the last fi fty
years, which consist mostly of slogans that are hurled about but that do not reduce into precise behaviors about what anybody should do.”