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<\/p>\nIn the late 1970s, Susie Andrist was on the precipice of changing the world. <\/p>\n
At least that\u2019s what she thought. She and her colleagues had spent a decade traveling all over the United States teaching disadvantaged kids in elementary schools. They flew in small, alarmingly bouncy planes. They drove old, unreliable cars. <\/p>\n
Places such as Flippin, Arkansas, and Rosebud, South Dakota, became their second homes. <\/p>\n
In North Carolina and Rhode Island, they encountered cranky superintendents. In Mississippi, they encountered the Ku Klux Klan. <\/p>\n
They were out to prove a brand-new teaching method. The program, which had been criticized by the press and the educational elite, was participating in a grand federal experiment. <\/p>\n
The experiment was called Project Follow Through. It remains one of the largest educational studies in history. <\/p>\n
The federal government spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to answer a question: What works to help disadvantaged kids catch up to their peers? <\/p>\n
The study did provide some answers. But it didn\u2019t change education, or resolve debates about how to best teach America\u2019s children \u2014 especially those who have fallen behind. And that still breaks Andrist\u2019s heart. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s just astonishing to me that we\u2019re still fighting the same battles,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
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Susie Andrist (left) and colleague Phyllis Haddox share some \u201cdecompression time\u201d after a long day of work at the Engelmann-Becker Corporation offices in Eugene, Oregon. Andrist said this photo was taken during Project Follow Through, likely between 1973 and 1977.<\/p>\n
Courtesy of Charlene Tolles-Engelmann<\/p>\n
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Susie Andrist (right) with Direct Instruction creator Zig Engelmann at their offices in Eugene. They worked on Project Follow Through together in the 1960s and \u201970s.<\/p>\n
Courtesy of Charlene Tolles-Engelmann<\/p>\n
A chance to find out what works<\/p>\n
Over nearly a decade, Project Follow Through tested 22 educational programs for children in kindergarten through third grade. <\/p>\n
Meeting notes from the project convey a sense of optimism that the huge federal investment would pay off because it would provide a direction for American schools. At one 1968 gathering, a government official called Follow Through \u201ctruly significant\u201d and talked of its ability to \u201cstudy and produce change.\u201d Another participant described a desire to \u201cchange the system\u201d and went on to say, \u201cMany people see (Follow Through) as a mechanism for change.\u201d <\/p>\n
Sold a Story<\/p>\n
The Office of Education, a predecessor to the Department of Education, intended to disseminate successful programs across the nation. <\/p>\n Both government leaders and educators expected that Follow Through would positively impact students, regardless of which teaching approach was used. <\/p>\n After a decade of tireless work and massive federal spending, the study found the vast majority of the educational programs failed to improve student outcomes, or even had negative effects. Except for one. It was called Direct Instruction.<\/p>\n But driven by the voices of disgruntled program developers, an influential foundation set out to discredit the report. <\/p>\n It worked. The Follow Through study did not change American schools. In fact, the government abandoned its plan to promote the educational programs that had proven most effective.<\/p>\n Today, schools that use the winning program tend to use it only with students who are struggling academically. But for a brief moment 50 years ago, it was poised to change education, offering a solution to teaching the poorest kids in America \u2014 and in fact, to teaching all kids. <\/p>\n The history of Follow Through is buried in the National Archives. APM Reports examined 34 boxes of original government documents, and tracked down and interviewed 20 people who were involved with the project. The reporting revealed a complex story of politics and professional rivalry: <\/p>\n There was a clear winner. Evaluators hired by the federal government found Direct Instruction was the most successful program. <\/p>\n The Ford Foundation, which had financially supported some of the unsuccessful programs, commissioned a report that challenged the results of the entire study. In an interview, the lead author of that report took credit for the government\u2019s decision not to back Direct Instruction. <\/p>\n Instead, the government started giving more money to the Follow Through programs that had not done well. The rationale was that those programs needed more time to prove themselves. <\/p>\n Multiple people who worked on Follow Through said they still believe the nation missed something by disregarding the results.<\/p>\n Internal government documents show the Office of Education feared the public would judge Follow Through too harshly and thus sought to control the narrative by withholding data or delaying its release. <\/p>\n Evaluators caved to influential educators\u2019 demands for anonymity, destroying the ability to reanalyze the data using modern methodological tools. <\/p>\n APM Reports reviewed all the original records of Project Follow Through at the National Archives.<\/p>\n Emily Haavik | APM Reports<\/p>\n A confusing conception <\/p>\n In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced an effort to help poor children catch up to their more privileged peers in school. The new initiative would \u201cfollow through\u201d on Johnson\u2019s preschool program, Head Start. <\/p>\n \u201cWe must make special efforts to overcome the handicap of poverty by more individual attention, by creative courses, by more teachers trained in child development,\u201d Johnson said in a message to Congress. \u201cThis will not be easy.\u201d <\/p>\n And it wasn\u2019t. <\/p>\n The mounting costs of the Vietnam War were squeezing the federal budget. Just two months before Follow Through was approved, Congress slashed its funding by more than 80%. Project organizers scrambled to keep it alive. <\/p>\n Instead of a full-scale service program like Head Start, Follow Through was reimagined as a research project. <\/p>\n The Office of Education chose 22 instructional programs to launch pilots in schools all over the country. They were supposed to represent the nation\u2019s most innovative approaches to education. <\/p>\n \u200a\u201cFor the first time, research institutions, universities, others with theoretical and experimental ideas about education of children, were asked to take their ideas from the college classroom, from textbooks or from laboratory school, and put them into practice in the public schools,\u201d said one of the Follow Through evaluators, Bob St. Pierre, in an interview.<\/p>\n Zig Engelmann (left) was known for his big personality and bullish determination. This student photo (right) is likely from the 1960s Bereiter-Engelmann preschool in Champaign, Illinois.<\/p>\n Courtesy of Charlene Tolles-Engelmann<\/p>\n Direct Instruction was a relative newcomer among the competing programs. Another contender, Bank Street College of Education, was a revered graduate school in Manhattan. Established in 1916, it had already helped the government launch Head Start. <\/p>\n Follow Through officials relied heavily on education insiders from the earliest stages of the project. Bank Street\u2019s dean, Gordon Klopf, led the first advisory committee. The Ford Foundation, which would go on to fund Bank Street and several other Follow Through program developers, helped choose which educational programs would be tested.<\/p>\n Powerful forces were already at work, and they would shape the interpretation of results for the public. The data that was intended to solve the mystery of what helps disadvantaged kids learn would end up challenged, obfuscated, and eventually, irretrievable. <\/p>\n What\u2019s the goal? <\/p>\n A look through thousands of pages of internal Follow Through documents preserved at the National Archives revealed a state of turmoil. <\/p>\n From the first massive budget cut, the project was fighting for its own survival. Money was a continual source of stress. So, too, was the fear that the government\u2019s investment would be viewed as a waste. <\/p>\n John Evans with the Office of Education cheekily called Follow Through \u201can acrimonious and unresolved series of arguments\u201d among everyone with a vested interest, from administrators to Congress. <\/p>\n Follow Through was thrown together hastily. Organizers were racing to get programs into schools by the fall of 1968. One government memo stated, \u201cThis program was developed on a \u2018crash\u2019 basis with insufficient staff, many of whom had no previous government experience.\u201d <\/p>\n Educational program developers and government organizers had trouble coming to terms about what, in fact, they were supposed to be measuring. The programs had varying goals and philosophies. <\/p>\n A small minority, which included Direct Instruction, were highly structured and academic. They were grouped as programs focused on basic skills. <\/p>\n The other programs were wide-ranging, but underlying many of them was a belief that children should discover knowledge through their own experiences \u2014 a theory based on the work of developmental psychologist Jean Piaget and educational philosopher John Dewey. Those included Bank Street and another prominent program, Michigan-based High\/Scope, both of which are still active today. <\/p>\n The discovery-based programs had more abstract goals such as improving self-esteem and social skills. They repeatedly complained about the tools used to measure their success. It may be easy to test kids on reading or math, they argued, but how could one tell if their confidence improved? <\/p>\n At a meeting in 1968, the notes document one program developer saying he was \u201cbothered by the fact we are trying to do unconventional things but evaluating them in a conventional way.\u201d And one report stated that, as early as 1969, some of the developers felt \u201cthe cards were stacked\u201d in favor of the basic skills programs. <\/p>\n As the discontent mounted, Follow Through expanded. At its peak in the 1971-72 school year, there were 80,000 children enrolled across nearly 180 communities. <\/p>\n A 1978 article in the Belleville News-Democrat showcased the East St. Louis, Illinois, Follow Through site. This photo shows Clifford Fields\u2019 third grade class at Dunbar Elementary School.<\/p>\n A lack of transparency <\/p>\n The government contracted Stanford Research Institute (SRI) to gather data from schools and see if students were improving. <\/p>\n But once SRI reviewed that first year of data, 1968-69, the Office of Education decided to withhold it from the public. They did the same with the data from the next school year. <\/p>\n Internal meeting notes show that officials and developers agreed programs shouldn’t be judged while they were getting up and running. Follow Through Director Robert Egbert wrote in a letter to project coordinators that releasing data prematurely could be \u201cseriously misleading.\u201d<\/p>\n It is not surprising that government leaders withheld the first-year results. APM Reports found a copy of that draft report buried in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. It showed that students enrolled in Follow Through programs were performing inconsistently and sometimes even worse than kids who weren\u2019t involved at all. <\/p>\n This draft report from the first year of Follow Through was never released to the public. APM Reports found it buried in the National Archives.<\/p>\n National Archives<\/p>\n SRI wrote in a summary of the report that \u201cthere definitely seems to be some overall tendency\u201d for kids in Follow Through to do better than other children \u201cin certain variables.\u201d They went on to write, \u201cIn others the tendency is not so great.\u201d <\/p>\n One Follow Through staffer who was quoted anonymously in a 1976 history of the project said, \u201cWe all expected a \u2018slam-bang\u2019 effect that would give the program a big boost. But it just wasn\u2019t there.\u201d <\/p>\n W. Ray Rhine, who worked on the SRI evaluation, was later quoted as saying, \u201cthere were deliberate efforts made to restrict the amount of information.\u201d <\/p>\n The reluctance to share data didn\u2019t sit well with educators at the schools participating in the project. The New York City Board of Education wrote increasingly irate letters to Follow Through\u2019s leadership. By 1971, some program developers and communities were pushing so hard for data that Follow Through began releasing it. <\/p>\n Meanwhile, another disagreement simmered. Meeting notes document ongoing concerns about comparing the educational programs, otherwise known as models, to one another. Even the evaluators were hesitant to make direct comparisons. But over the years, a few key Follow Through leaders charged forward in their efforts to find a winner. <\/p>\n Evans, who led Follow Through for the Office of Education, called the project a \u201chorse race\u201d and argued \u201cit is mushy policy to say that all models made a fine effort, so \u2018take your choice.\u2019\u201d Another Follow Through director, Garry McDaniels, wrote that \u201cone of the greatest potential attractions of Follow Through\u201d was the opportunity to rank the different educational models. <\/p>\n The results are in <\/p>\n The Office of Education hired a firm called Abt Associates to analyze the data SRI had been collecting. In 1977, Abt published what everyone had been waiting for: the final evaluation of Project Follow Through. <\/p>\n The results for most programs were unimpressive. Abt Associates author Richard B. Anderson said in an interview with APM Reports that his team had the unenviable job of \u201cdisappointing the crud out of\u201d the program developers who had hoped to make a positive impact. <\/p>\n Many programs, including Bank Street and High\/Scope, had neutral or even negative effects on student achievement. The Abt Associates team noted in its report, \u201cApparently, it is genuinely hard to raise the test scores of disadvantaged children.\u201d<\/p>\n Even so, in the charts and graphs that Abt Associates published, one program continually rose to the top. It had \u201csubstantially higher average effects\u201d and was the only \u201cnotable exception\u201d to a trend of programs showing more negative than positive effects on basic skills test scores. It was Direct Instruction. <\/p>\n Average effects on basic skills for each Follow Through program<\/p>\n APM Reports recreated this chart showing the average effect of each program in the basic skills area by tracing the lines in the original chart published in the final government evaluation of Project Follow Through (1977). The report did not provide numerical values.<\/p>\n Direct Instruction excelled not only in basic skills, but also in the problem-solving domain. <\/p>\n Most surprisingly, Direct Instruction beat all the other programs in \u201cattitudes toward learning\u201d and self-concept \u2014 areas in which other program leaders expected to excel. <\/p>\n Abt Associates drew the conclusion that, in general, the \u201cbasic skills\u201d programs were the most effective. <\/p>\n These findings were scattered throughout the 277-page behemoth of a final evaluation. Anderson called it the last in a series of \u201cenormous unreadable reports.\u201d <\/p>\n Because the findings were so dense, it was largely up to the press, the government, and other experts in the world of academia and evaluation to interpret them. <\/p>\n A newspaper columnist for the Washington Star summarized the report like this: \u201cBasics are better.\u201d <\/p>\n But that\u2019s not the only interpretation that gained traction.<\/p>\n Results under fire <\/p>\n Follow Through\u2019s results showed that, after hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, nearly every program had failed to produce academic gains. The Office of Education was not pleased. <\/p>\n \u201cGovernment people did not like what we found, because it wasn\u2019t what Follow Through was supposed to do,\u201d Anderson recalled in an interview. <\/p>\n Most of the program developers felt they were being evaluated unfairly \u2014 and some had a relationship with one of the nation\u2019s largest philanthropic organizations. <\/p>\n The Ford Foundation had financially supported several of the program developers for years, and would go on to support more of them. Marjorie Martus, who worked for the foundation, even helped select the programs that participated in Follow Through. <\/p>\n After the disastrous final report, Martus called an evaluation expert, Ernest House. She asked him to see if there was anything to the complaints. <\/p>\n House met with the program developers in Michigan, where they were hosted at a rural camp by the creator of the High\/Scope program. There, the developers explained their frustrations. They felt the evaluation was too narrow to capture their programs\u2019 more abstract goals. Evaluators had intended to establish new tools to measure these goals \u2014 but had never delivered. <\/p>\n \u201cI decided they had a reasonable complaint about what they had been promised,\u201d House said in an interview with APM Reports. <\/p>\n The Ford Foundation then hired House to convene a panel of experts and reanalyze the Follow Through data. In 1978, less than a year after the government\u2019s final report came out, the panel published a rebuttal.<\/p>\n The panel pointed out that no single program was successful everywhere it was tried \u2014 even Direct Instruction. This, House and his panel wrote, was the primary finding of Follow Through: Nothing works everywhere. <\/p>\n There were already well-known issues with the project\u2019s experimental design. The sites were not selected randomly, and neither were the control groups. The study lost a lot of students over time. Abt Associates had acknowledged all these problems in their final report, adding caveats to the findings. <\/p>\n But House\u2019s panel went further, saying the quality of the data was insufficient to compare programs, let alone declare winners. <\/p>\n \u200a\u201cThe Department of Ed wanted to say this is the best reading program, the best early childhood education program, and presumably, other people should adopt this program,\u201d House said. \u201cWe said there\u2019s no simple answer here.\u201d <\/p>\n House now believes his report convinced the government to switch strategies. <\/p>\n \u200a\u201cOur critique was very effective in stopping the government from saying Direct Instruction \u2026 that\u2019s the way to go,\u201d he said. \u201cI explained to them … that the programs have different effects in different settings. And it\u2019s very difficult to say one program is going to fit the entire country.\u201d <\/p>\n Direct Instruction remained on top in reranking of programs<\/p>\n Ernest House and his panel published a chart showing the government\u2019s original rankings of the Follow Through programs, and the new rankings after a reanalysis. Direct Instruction\u2019s number-one ranking did not change. The biggest winner was High\/Scope (also known as Cognitive Curriculum), which moved up five spots.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not clear which program developers requested the Ford Foundation\u2019s intervention, prompting the damning critique. House said that many people called Martus, and when he met the developers in person, everyone except the representatives of Direct Instruction complained. House said \u201cby far the most outspoken\u201d was David Weikart, host of the retreat and creator of High\/Scope. Documents obtained by APM Reports revealed that Weikart also wrote to Martus to thank her, predicting the rebuttal would be a \u201cbest seller.\u201d <\/p>\n David Weikart, creator of the High\/Scope program, wrote a letter thanking the Ford Foundation for commissioning the Follow Through critique.<\/p>\n Martus died in 2001. The Ford Foundation did not want to comment for this story. <\/p>\n House said he has no dislike of Direct Instruction. Another member of his panel, though, expressed sharp criticism of the program.<\/p>\n Gene Glass is a well-known figure in academic evaluation and a former president of the American Educational Research Association. Glass disliked Direct Instruction long before he joined House\u2019s panel. He told APM Reports that he watched about 10 minutes of a Direct Instruction lesson in the 1960s. He thought it was \u201cunimpressive\u201d and even seemed to \u201ctorment\u201d children. <\/p>\n In the areas where his panel could not refute Direct Instruction\u2019s success, such as its language scores, he believes it simply teaches to the test. <\/p>\n \u200a\u201cI grant them nothing, nothing,\u201d Glass said in an interview with APM Reports. \u201cI find no evidence in the entire Follow Through evaluation that they have anything special or worthy of wide distribution.\u201d <\/p>\n But two researchers who worked on Follow Through 50 years ago said in interviews that they remain convinced that Direct Instruction was shown to be the most effective program. <\/p>\n \u200a\u201cIf you look at averages, then on average, Direct Instruction is doing better than other projects,\u201d said Bob St. Pierre, one of the Abt Associates evaluators. <\/p>\n \u201cI think a lot of people have biases that make them not want to accept it,\u201d said Andrew Porter, who worked as a research adviser to the Follow Through project in his role at Michigan State University. \u201cDirect Instruction just doesn\u2019t square with the beliefs and values of a lot of teacher educators.\u201d <\/p>\n Fighting back <\/p>\n When the government\u2019s ambivalence about the final results became clear, the leaders of Direct Instruction took action. Zig Engelmann and co-director Wesley Becker sent their complaints (peppered with language such as \u201csham\u201d and \u201ctravesty\u201d) to top education officials. <\/p>\n Rosemary Wilson, the director of Follow Through at that time, wrote back, echoing House and Glass: \u201cNo single instructional approach, including that of Direct Instruction, was found to be consistently effective in all of the projects where it was tried and evaluated.\u201d Wilson was correct. Although Direct Instruction had positive effects, on average, across the country, one analysis showed 3 of 10 sites had negative effects. <\/p>\n But in 1978, Engelmann and Becker’s inquiries received a response from someone much more influential: Commissioner of Education Ernest Boyer, one of the highest-ranking education officials in the United States. Boyer acknowledged that Direct Instruction was the only program \u201cfound to produce positive results more consistently than any of the others.\u201d<\/p>\n But since there was only one successful program, Boyer wrote that the federal government had decided to pivot. <\/p>\n Even unsuccessful programs worked well in at least one location. So the government would promote successful sites instead of successful programs. <\/p>\n A 1979 federal guide catalogued around 250 of these government-endorsed, \u201cexemplary\u201d educational program sites. Only three of them used Direct Instruction. <\/p>\n A few years later, in 1982, Direct Instruction was dealt another blow. The Department of Education gave even more money to unsuccessful programs, in the hopes that those programs could improve. Education officials believed this would provide public schools with something that was, and still is, central to American education \u2014 more options. <\/p>\n This strategy also allowed the Department of Education to support popular programs that championed children\u2019s experiences and individuality, instead of claiming that one structured approach could work best for all kids. <\/p>\n Looking back, Andrist said she remembers how she felt when she and her team realized the federal government was not going to spread Direct Instruction across the nation.<\/p>\n Andrist said other program leaders experienced rage. She felt grief. <\/p>\n \u201cJust thinking about so many kids\u2019 lives who could be dramatically different than what they\u2019re going to be,\u201d she said. \u201cThat is probably the heartbreak of my career.\u201d <\/p>\n Re-examining Project Follow Through <\/p>\n For those who wished to disregard the Follow Through results, the study\u2019s design flaws made it easier to do so.<\/p>\n In 2026, researcher Jean Stockard thought she had found a way to change that. She discovered that the raw Follow Through data was available online. She hoped it would give her a chance to take a fresh look at the study\u2019s findings.<\/p>\n \u200a\u201cThe Follow Through data is an amazing dataset,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n She spent weeks converting and cleaning the decades-old files. Then, she made an unpleasant discovery. The data had been intentionally scrambled \u2014 largely at the request of the program developers.<\/p>\n SRI explained the decision in an accompanying document by saying, \u201cconcern has been expressed, particularly by Follow Through (program developers), that not only child and school-level confidentiality be maintained, but also project confidentiality.\u201d <\/p>\n At the request of those powerful voices in education, SRI agreed to anonymize the data. Stockard believes an error occurred in the process that made it impossible to relink the programs to their results. Today, she said, the data is basically useless. <\/p>\n \u201cA real disappointment and a real loss to the profession,\u201d Stockard said. <\/p>\n Quantitative sociologist Jean Stockard wrote the most extensive meta-analysis of Direct Instruction research in existence, finding that it has remained remarkably effective in all kinds of settings over 50 years. Years after she published it, she attempted to reanalyze the raw data from Project Follow Through \u2014 only to find it irrevocably scrambled. <\/p>\n Yehyun Kim for APM Reports<\/p>\n Another researcher, Stanford education and economics professor Thomas Dee, hoped to use modern techniques to account for the problems with Follow Through\u2019s experimental design and try to verify its results. <\/p>\n \u201cTo have run this large-scale experiment and not be in a position to take away lessons from it is such a waste of our resources and effort,\u201d Dee said. <\/p>\n Sold a Story is an investigative podcast about how kids learn. Season 1<\/a> revealed why so many kids are struggling to learn how to read. Season 2<\/a> goes beyond reading to look at teaching itself.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/7e4cc5-20260922-sold-a-story-s2-e3-webp1000.webp\"\/)
<\/a>SEASON 2, EPISODE 3
\nThe Forgotten Experiment
Zig Engelmann gets the chance of a lifetime: Put Direct Instruction to the test in one of the largest education experiments ever conducted. The results could have changed the direction of American education. Instead, they\u2019re contested \u2014 and ultimately cast aside. <\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/b04a90-20261008-project-follow-through-at-the-national-archives-600.jpg\"\/)
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