Why Aren't Effective Teaching Tools Widely Adopted?

Effective educational methods are available.They have been available for a long time.They are mostly behavioral, structured, fast paced, and require a high proportion of regular daily practice.Given this, it is irresponsible to invest more public funds on educational research without first installing the powerful results of the research we have already bought and paid for.The fate of highly productive educational meth- ods in public instruction is a national shame.No highly effective educational method or program has ever been widely adopted in North America.I didn't understand and accept this until 1983, when I read the results of Project Follow Through and how they had been ignored and covered up (Car- nine, 1983; Engelmann & Carnine, 1982).Here, the dear-cut results of the most extensive and most expensive educational research ever conducted were being ignored.You couldn't even get the reports out of Washington.These were the results of in- vesting public funds, and they had run out of reports!They couldn't find them!"Call back next Monday!"To me, this was scandalous.At the time, we were getting precision teaching tried school-wide and district-wide, but had never reached the point of Follow Through's massive demonstrations of many city-wide programs, nor compared results among nine different teaching models, as Follow Through did by the end of the project.The two behavioral models (direct instruction and behavior analysis) produced the largest gains in basic skills.The self-concept oriented models actually worsened the student's achievements below the average cur- riculum control schools.This stopped me dead in Send correspondence and reprint requests to the author, Route 1 Box 157, Lawrence, Kansas 66044-9801.my tracks!If precision teaching continued and pro- gressed to the point ofcity-wide public school com- parisons, with control groups, independent evalu- ation, and was found superior, it would still be ignored!Programmed instruction, the personalized system of instruction (PSI), direct instruction, and precision teaching have all been terminated where they were successful.The PSI approach was killed at North Eastern and at Georgetown, and is restricted to only one course at the behavioral mecca in the Department of Human Development at the University of Kansas.It is hard to keep your humor when you accept the fact that you invested 25 years in developing methods that can help your nation out of the ed- ucational abyss into which it is racing.You made these methods inexpensive.You made them dear.You helped illustrate their worth.You made them attractive.Yet they are ignored or rejected because of popular myth and bigotry.I should have known this when I started in 1965, but I didn't.I went blissfully on even though others tried to warn me.Remember Turnley!One of the strongest warnings came to me in the late 1960s from Winifred Stewart, director of the Edmonton, Alberta, School for the Retarded.Winifred took me to dinner after my lecture to the Alberta Teachers Association and my workshop at the school.She was an elegant British Canadian.With warmth and grace, she took my hand, looked kindly into my eyes, and told me to always keep my presence of mind and my humor.I laughed and said, "Why do you tell me such a thing?"She said, "Because you will need to fall back on humor some day."Then she told me the tragedy ofFrancis Turnley.