The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [114]
A century ago, American educators began projecting their own emotions onto the educational process. Deciding that the repetition involved in learning phonics was too dull for them, they eliminated it for the kids who needed it. But as any parent who’s had to sit through multiple consecutive viewings of The Land Before Time XIII can tell you, children love repetition. Unlike the chaotic, seemingly illogical world around them, repetition offers them the power of prediction, of guessing ahead and being right. In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell relates how the creators of Blue’s Clues had a tough sell when they asked the network to air each episode five times. The whole week would be the same episode over and over again! They’d done their research, and kids had no problem with watching the same episode repeatedly, becoming more excited as they worked through the same puzzles, grasping the concepts better each time. Phonics instruction works in exactly the same way, both in allowing the children to build up their knowledge and apply it better with practice, and in appealing to the inner delight that comes from mastery.
Like Blue’s Clues, DI is research driven. The first book that directed Benjamin’s attention to DI was Super Crunchers; Ian Ayres used it as an example of his larger discussion on the battle between intuition and data. DI, of course, was in the camp representing data. While individual teachers with their varied methods may feel they know best how to teach their students, the abnormally high rate (for a First World country) of illiteracy (14 percent of American adults in 2003—30 million people) suggests that the school system has largely failed. In 1967, President Johnson initiated Project Follow Through, a long-term government study of seventeen different teaching methods. Eight years later, DI was the hands-down winner across multiple measures of success. DI students earned the highest test scores in core subjects like vocabulary and math, but Project Follow Through also checked students’ ability to tackle higher-order thinking problems and even determined which students had the highest self-esteem. DI won in those categories too, proving that when students are given the chance to feel smart by actually understanding the material, everything else would fall into place. But thirty years after that revealing data, DI is still used by only a handful of schools in America.
Why? In part, because the program hasn’t sold itself effectively. It still makes people uncomfortable, in spite of repeatedly proving to be a superior model. Teachers in particular worry over the loss of their autonomy, but the Hollywood ideal of the heroic rogue teacher succeeding amid widespread failure needs to be beaten back to make room for a school system where everyone wins together. While teachers might fight DI at the outset, the program often changes their minds, thanks to a couple of key factors. First off, since the lessons are scripted, there’s no prep time needed. Teachers are overworked and underpaid as it is, and this can take some pressure off. Most teachers have to do their lesson planning on their own time. Second, and more significantly, DI works. Once the teachers see how effective it is, how specific changes in their method can make a huge difference, they tend to come around.
“What can we do?” I wondered as we drove back to my apartment.
“Somehow, we can help.” My friend was silent a moment, but then erupted in typical Benjamin fashion. “Thing is, President Obama recently kicked off his ‘Race to the Top’ initiative. Grants for the K-through-12 schools that seem to be performing the best. Education’s a huge priority because—like health care and energy—it’s a game changer. They’re the issues that dig tentacles into other