Tackling educational inequality - CentreForum

Tackling educational inequality
Project Follow Through
Project Follow Through (FT) remains the world’s largest educational
experiment, running from 1967 to 1995 and costing
approximately $1 billion. FT planned to evaluate whether the
poorest schools in America could be brought up to a level comparable
with mainstream America. 30 The study comprehensively
demonstrated that school level factors – specifically curriculum
and teaching quality – can overcome the educational disadvantages
inherent in deprivation.
The project focused on over 75,000 low income children from
kindergarten to grade 3 (nine years old) and funded 22 very
different educational programmes in 51 school districts with
a disproportionate number of poor children. Standardised test
results were collected from almost 10,000 children as well as from
a control group. 31 The results from the project were suppressed
in the 1970s because they did not support contemporary pedagogical
trends. However, they demonstrated that the use of a
teaching model which used systematic and direct instructional
methods increased both attainment and other qualities such as
confidence, behaviour and self-esteem, and that these effects
were sustained throughout high school. This model, known as
the ‘direct instructional’ model provides a systematic ways of
determining whether children have the prerequisite skills before
a new step in learning is undertaken. It stresses basic skills and
breaks them down into mini components. Children learn to read,
for example, by learning the sounds of the letters before the
letter names. They master each skill before moving onto the next
one and teachers track each student’s progress on daily charts.
They also track behaviour, encouraging good conduct with
praise and largely ignoring bad behaviour. Using this method,
the model was able to achieve a major goal of ‘compensatory’
education: it improved the academic performance of economically
disadvantaged children to (or near to) median national levels
(compared with the expected 20th percentile levels expected of
disadvantaged pupils). 32
Research in the UK also concludes that the quality of schooling does
matter. Two of the most influential English studies on school effectiveness
concluded that schools can have a significant impact on children’s
outcomes, particularly at the primary level. 33 For example, after controlling
for prior attainment and pupil factors, it was found that the school
attended accounted for 9 per cent of the variance in reading attainment
40