January 16, 2007

Free Stuff

Everyone loves free stuff so mark January 22 on your calendars, kids. That's the day Zig Engelmann will start giving us material from his latest book: The Outrage of Project Follow Through, 5 million failed kids later.

We'll be getting one chapter a week, each week, until we have all seven chapters. Here's the schedule for release:

Chapter 1: Before Project Follow Through (Jan 22)
Chapter 2. Project Follow Through Begins (Jan 29)
Chapter 3. Follow Through continues (Feb 5)
Chapter 4. During Follow Through (Feb 12)
Chapter 5. Follow Through Evaluation (Feb 19)
Chapter 6: Follow Through Aftermath (Feb 26)
Chapter 7. The New Millennium (Mar 5)

Each chapter will be available for two weeks and then the fat cats in Washington will be taking it away, which means you'll have to buy it.

You might think that a thirty year old educational study doesn't have much to teach us. You'd be wrong. Most of the failed education fads that were tested in Project Follow Through, and failed miserably, are in use in thousands of classrooms across the country, often in renamed form.

The list of educational writers that know what they're talking about and are worth your time reading is short indeed. Zig is on that short list. Don't miss this opportunity.

6 comments:

allen said...

Link?

KDeRosa said...

fixed.

allen said...

Mr. Engelmann is obviously a man of great intelligence and insight.

How do I know?

Here's a line out of the prologue:

The theme of the book is that urban school districts, as they are currently configured, can't possibly work because their structure, logic, and philosophy are anti-scientific.

OK, that makes two of us who know that districts are the primary agents of disaster in public education. Two more and we can form a barber shop quartet.

I wonder whether he's insightful enough to see charters as the politically feasible stepping-stone necessary to move away from the district system?

KDeRosa said...

Allen, have you seen Engelmann's 1998 video interview?

Check out clip six in particular where he talks about some of the problems he's had dealing with school districts. It's horrifying.

allen said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
KDeRosa said...

That's it.