Failing Grade

WESLEY Elementary School in Houston has all the demographic markers of school failure. It is located in the inner city, and its student body is 92 per cent black and 7 per cent Hispanic; 82 per cent of the school’s students qualify for subsidized lunches, triple the rate at Houston’s top dozen schools. Yet Wesley Elementary ranks among them. Its firstgraders place in the 82nd percentile in reading tests, 50 percentiles higher than their counterparts at most schools with similar proportions of “at-risk” kids.

Wesley principal Thaddeus Lott has a potent weapon against failure: the Direct Instruction curricula designed by Siegfried Engelmann. In education, a 10-percentile rise in standardized-test scores is called a “major effect.” Such results are rare. Engelmann’s Direct Instruction methods in reading, writing, and math regularly hike scores 30 to 40 percentiles. And he will never be forgiven for it.

RN

About the Author

Richard Nadler

Richard Nadler is president of the Americas Majority Foundation, a public-policy think tank in Overland Park, Kan.

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WESLEY Elementary School in Houston has all the demographic markers of school failure. It is located in the inner city, and its student body is 92 per cent black and 7 per cent Hispanic; 82 per cent of the school’s students qualify for subsidized lunches, triple the rate at Houston’s top dozen schools. Yet Wesley Elementary ranks among them. Its firstgraders place in the 82nd percentile in reading tests, 50 percentiles higher than their counterparts at most schools with similar proportions of “at-risk” kids.

Wesley principal Thaddeus Lott has a potent weapon against failure: the Direct Instruction curricula designed by Siegfried Engelmann. In education, a 10-percentile rise in standardized-test scores is called a “major effect.” Such results are rare. Engelmann’s Direct Instruction methods in reading, writing, and math regularly hike scores 30 to 40 percentiles. And he will never be forgiven for it.