Direct Instruction is good for students. Schools rarely stick with it
Donna Dwiggins drove around Guam in a pickup truck, stopping at schools all over the island. She was retrieving books from a discarded curriculum, something the school district had mandated just a handful of years earlier. Dwiggins had moved to the island to support the rollout of the program. Then it all fell apart.
Guam’s Department of Education had received a federal grant to bring Direct Instruction, an effective but controversial method of teaching, to nearly all its elementary schools. The process was contentious from the start, Dwiggins recalled.
“Most of the time you’re going into politically hot situations, because they have failed,” Dwiggins said. “The people from the district holding on by their fingernails to their jobs are really offended because you’ve been brought in to fix the problem that they created.”
For decades, Dwiggins worked with Direct Instruction in classrooms across the United States and its territories. She says she has worked with it in hundreds of schools, but few of them are still using it. Despite a mountain of research on its effectiveness, many schools eventually give up on Direct Instruction. APM Reports wanted to understand why.
We contacted more than a hundred schools and districts that have used Direct Instruction at some point since its inception in the 1960s. We talked to people who used it in small, rural schools and large, urban districts. People told us about why they started the program and why they stopped.
Some patterns emerged:
