Zig Engelmann, the father of Direct Instruction and Reading Mastery, is posting a chapter of his new book on his web site every two weeks. The Outrage of Project Follow Through: 5 Million Failed Kids Later deals with a big, long-term federal study of reading programs for poor children that found Direct Instruction helped disadvantaged children achieve at or near the 50th percentile; their scores were strong on higher-order thinking and self-esteem as well. None of the other models tested produced positive results in all three measures; in most, children lost ground. The results were ignored and some of the worst models became fashionable.

D-Ed Reckoning has a number of posts, starting here, analyzing Engelmann’s work. Chapter two is now up. I love the quote about John Dewey:

A distinguished white-haired man on the main floor stood up and gave a long, dramatic oration. He ended by saying in rising volume, “I hear talk of skills and sub-skills and sub-skills of sub-skills, but why is there nowhere in Mr. Engelmann’s presentation one word about [pause and dramatic point toward the ceiling] learn by doing and do by doing!”

Explosion of cheers, shouts, applause, which lasted probably more than 10 seconds.

When the place calmed down, I said, “Well, I promised Bob Egbert that I wouldn’t say bullshit, but I’ll try to answer your question anyhow.” I went on to explain that not only was the originator of slogans about learning, John Dewey, dead but that there was nothing to suggest that his slogans had much relevance to the problems facing disadvantaged kids.

Later, Engelmann was told the white-haired man was director of math instruction in New York City.

Reading First is working well, writes Sol Stern in the new City Journal. The problem is huge:

After a century and a half of universal public education, and despite the highest per-pupil expenditure on public elementary and secondary education in the world, 40 percent of U.S. fourth-graders are reading below the minimally acceptable level, according to the gold-standard NAEP test. For minority students in inner-city schools, the reading failure rate is a shocking 65 percent.

Stern contrasts a very poor, nearly all black district in Virginia that used Reading First to fund a new phonics program with an affluent suburban district that refused to change. The black students in the poor district, who started out way behind, now outscore black students in the wealthy district in reading and are closing in on all students in the wealthy district.

Alabama also is seeing dramatic results.

On state reading tests, Reading First students rocketed from 29 percent at grade level in 2004 to 39 percent in 2005 and 46 percent in 2006. On diagnostic reading tests for early-grade children, the Reading First cohort has — astonishingly, since it encompassed the lowest-performing students in the state — almost reached parity with Alabama’s broader student population.

On the other hand, New York City has botched implementation of Reading First, despite getting much more money per student than states like Alabama, Stern writes.

Wisconsin may require schools to teach Hmong history — especially the Hmong role as U.S. allies during the Vietnam War — to ease racial tensions.

“All of the difficulties that the Hmong face and experience in the U.S. are due to the fact that there is no formal teaching about the Hmong to the general public,” said Za Blong Vang, president of the Hmong Community of Wisconsin. He spoke in Hmong but provided an English translation of his remarks.

This month, a white hunter was charged with killing a Hmong hunter. Some fear the killing was revenge for the murder of six white hunters two years ago by a Hmong deer hunter, who claimed the victims shouted racial slurs.

I’m not persuaded that hate crimes are caused by ignorance of history. Surely the sort of people who murder others because of their ethnicity are not the sort to be turned around by a history lesson — or, more likely, — a two-minute “mention.” They need to learn self-control and manners, which are difficult to teach in school if parents aren’t demonstrating those qualities at home.

Teachers’ unions aren’t to blame for our schools’ problems, writes Diane Ravitch in American Educator, the magazine of the American Federation of Teachers. Unions serve as a check against incompetent administrators.

If scores are low, the critics say it must be because of the teachers’ contract, not because the district has a weak curriculum or lacks resources or has mediocre leadership. If some teachers are incompetent, it must be because of the contract, not because the district has a flawed, bureaucratic hiring process or has failed to evaluate new teachers before awarding them tenure.

Corporate-style reformers believe “the way to fix low-performing schools is to install an autocratic principal who rules with an iron fist,” Ravitch writes.

Many new principals have been trained in quickie programs of a year or less, which try to teach them to think like corporate leaders. Many of the graduates of these new principal programs have little classroom experience, and some have none at all. Many of them lack the judgment and knowledge to make wise decisions about curriculum and instruction or to evaluate seasoned teachers.

When experienced teachers must work under the control of an inexperienced principal, they need the protection of their union against arbitrary and unwise decisions.

Education Gadfly worries that Ravitch’s “checks and balances” approach could be all check and no balance, ending in paralysis.

To us, that’s part of the appeal of charter schools, where educators can coalesce around a shared educational vision, avoiding the us-versus-them mentality that permeates today’s debates. Would that their visions were always worth coalescing around!

I do wonder how many non-teachers can make good principals and superintendents — a retired admiral to run LA schools? — but complaints about incompetent administrators predate the reform era. I think they predate the Pleistocene Era.

Update: On This Week in Education — make sure you have the new URL — Alexander Russo observes that Ravitch seems to be moving left.

By the way, Ravitch is a professor and author of numerous books, including Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms and The Language Police. Her latest book is The English Reader. Though she was writing in a teachers’ union magazine, she is not a union member.

Susan Eaton’s The Children in Room E4 is a heartbreaking account of a dedicated teacher and her black and Hispanic students in Hartford, Connecticut, says Teacher Magazine. It’s also the saga of Hartford’s decades-long desegregation lawsuit.

. . . most Hartford kids are worse than poor. They are “experientially impoverished”: clamped in such intense poverty, both in their neighborhoods and at school, that they are shut out from the rest of American life.

Eaton questions whether raising standards and test scores — the school is relatively successful — is enough given Hartford’s failure to integrate classrooms and provide the same opportunities as suburban schools, writes reviewer Steve Weinberg in the Seattle Times. The city’s schools are 95 percent black and Hispanic.

It’s an old story told better elsewhere, writes reviewer David Nicholson on Education Sector.

What’s most valuable if not entirely new about The Children in Room E4, is its reminder that people, unlike rats, will continue down the same tunnels long after it’s apparent there is no cheese. This is, I know, harsh, but it seems an apt characterization of superintendents, principals, and educational consultants who keep devising solutions that are only variations of old ways of failing.

Middle-class parents — white, black, brown or purple — rarely choose to send their children to low-performing or even improving schools with a large majority of very low-income students. Integration by color and social class is a fantasy in a school system as far gone as Hartford’s. Better to focus on the needs of the students you’ve got. If they don’t know Hartford has a river, show them the river. Teach them to read and give them books about the world they don’t know.

Joe Miller’s Cross X is the story of a winning debate team at an inner-city Kansas City high school that received millions of dollars in a vain attempt to attract white students. When the desegregation plan was abandoned, the buildings were better but the quality of education was just as poor.

Ninety percent of students at Downtown College Prep, the charter school in my book, Our School, come from Mexican-American families, many of whom are isolated from mainstream America. The school is designed to help its very needy students catch up so they can go on to college and succeed in the larger world. Educating these students is the mission. Trying to emulate a suburban school or attract middle-class students would not serve the needs of the students they’ve got.

Super-students are arguing about which advanced classes are harder, Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or a new (to the U.S.) program from the University of Cambridge. The Washington Post reports:

AP students say that the IB program allows for too many open-ended questions on exams and that many IB assignments amount to busywork.

IB partisans . . . contend that their classes are more integrated and worldly and involve much more homework than AP’s. They cite the fact that they have to take at least six IB courses — three of them are two years long — and that one of them must be a foreign language class. . . . What’s more, IB diploma students have to write a 4,000-word mini-thesis.

. . . Cambridge fans say the program is the most challenging because it encourages students to spend more time analyzing material than memorizing facts.

. . . “I believe Cambridge is the most rigorous academic program that exists,” (Principal Alexander) Carter said. “The AP program is, ‘Show what you know.’ The Cambridge program is, ‘Show us what you can do with what you know.’ “

What students really want to know is: Which program do admissions officers at elite universities think is best?