Direct Instruction won Follow Through

Reanalysis of Project Follow Through’s large government dataset found that a highly structured, scripted program (Direct Instruction) outperformed other pedagogical models on basic skills, abstract reasoning, and even measures of student attitudes across a sample of hundreds of thousands of students over nearly a decade. Political and institutional reactions — funding shifts and narrative reframing — limited the study’s influence on national schooling choices. — If true and heeded, this historical result undermines discovery‑oriented assumptions in K–12 reform and argues for paying more attention to how governments collect, report, and act on large education experiments.