Sandra Kay Daniel is a middle-aged, second-grade teacher at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida. She is at the front line of the No Child Left Behind program, an ambitious effort towards educational reform in primary and secondary education.

Nearly all of you have probably seen an excerpt of Sandra in an evening news show, or a popular movie. The book Super Crunchers chronicles one of Sandy's lessons, as she leads her class through a particular book:

Open your book up to lesson sixty on page 153. And at the count of three. One-. Two-Three. Everyone should be on page 153. If the yellow paper is going to bother you, drop it. Thank you. Everyone touch the title of your story. Fingers under the title. Get ready to read the title-. The-Fast-Way. We're waiting for one member. Thank you. Fingers under the title of the story. Get ready! Class (in unison): "The Pet Goat." Yes. "The Pet Goat." Fingers under the first word of the story. Get ready to read the story the fast way. GET READY! The class begins reading the story in unison. As they read, the teacher taps her ruler against the board, beating out a steady rhythm. The students read one word per beat. Class (to the beat): A girl got a pet goat. Go on. Class (to the beat): She liked to go running with her pet goat. Go on. Class (to the beat): She played with her- Try it again. Get ready, from the beginning of that sentence. GET READY! Class (to the beat): She played with her goat in her house. Go on. Class (to the beat): The goat ate cans and he ate canes. Go on. Class (to the beat): One day her dad said that goat must go. What's behind the word "said"? Class (in unison): Comma. And what does that comma mean? Class: Slow down. Let's read that sentence again. Get ready! Class (to the beat): One day her dad said (pause) that goat must go.

The evening news show chronicles what happens next. President Bush, who was watching this drama unfold, is interrupted by Andrew Card, and informed that United Airlines Flight 175 has just struck the south tower of the World Trade Center. Bush had been visiting this class to show the press Ms. Daniel's use of a teaching method called Direct Instruction.

The Department of Education has funded more than $5 billion in randomized testing and funding evidence-based literature reviews to determine the state of knowledge of "what works" in education. The No Child Left Behind legislation uses the term "scientifically based research" over one hundred times, and thus makes facts and data, and peer-reviewed studies, rather than opinions and political power, the basis for their decision-making. To qualify to be "scientifically based," this research must "draw on observation or experiment" and "involve rigorous data analyses that are adequate to test the stated hypotheses." Direct Instruction is such an approach, and has a well supported and highly successful history, which we'll return to Super Crunchers to chronicle:

Concerned that "poor children tend to do poorly in school," the Office of Education and the Office of Economic Opportunity sought to determine what types of education models could best break this cycle of failure. The result was Project Follow Through, an ambitious effort that studied 79,000 children in 180 low-income communities for twenty years at a price tag of more than $600 million... At the time, it was the largest education study ever done. Project Follow Through looked at the impact of seventeen different teaching methods, ranging from models like DI, where lesson plans are carefully scripted, to unstructured models where students themselves direct their learning by selecting what and how they will study. Some models, like DI, emphasized acquisition of basic skills like vocabulary and arithmetic, others emphasized higher-order thinking and problem-solving skills, and still others emphasized positive attitudes toward learning and self-esteem.

Direct Instruction won hands down. Education writer Richard Nadler summed it up this way: "When the testing was over, students in DI classrooms had placed first in reading, first in math, first in spelling, and first in language. No other model came close." And DI's dominance wasn't just in basic skill acquisition. DI students could also more easily answer questions that required higher-order thinking. For example, DI students performed better on tests evaluating their ability to determine the meaning of an unfamiliar word from the surrounding context. DI students were also able to identify the most appropriate pieces to fill in gaps left in mathematical and visual patterns. DI even did better in promoting students' self-esteem than several child-centered approaches. This is particularly striking because a central purpose of child-centered teaching is to promote self-esteem by engaging children and making them the authors of their own education. More recent studies by both the American Federation of Teachers and the American Institutes for Research reviewed data on two dozen "whole school" reforms and found once again that the Direct Instruction model had the strongest empirical support. In 1998, the American Federation of Teachers included DI among six "promising programs to increase student achievement." The study concluded that when DI is properly implemented, the "results are stunning."

But wait - it gets even better. Direct Instruction is particularly effective at helping kids who are reading below grade level. Economically disadvantaged students and minorities thrive under DI instruction. And maybe most importantly, DI is scalable. Its success isn't contingent on the personality of some über-teacher. DI classes are entirely scripted. You don't need to be a genius to be an effective DI teacher. DI can be implemented in dozens upon dozens of classrooms with just ordinary teachers. You just need to be able to follow the script. If you have a school where third graders year after year are reading at a first-grade level, they are seriously at risk of being left behind. DI gives them a realistic shot of getting back to grade. If the school adopts DI from day one of kindergarten, the kids are much less likely to fall behind in the first place.

With evidence like this, all stakeholders should quickly move to align their behaviors and decision-making based upon approaches that are clearly superior to others in use, right? Well, it may seem like a good idea, but what's considered rational for one stakeholder's self-interests may not be rational for another's. Path dependence highlights the fact that certain ideas persist in a culture because they are self-reinforcing. This can be due to a focus on satisficing, a belief that certain ideas will not be sufficiently better than others to justify switch-over costs. It can also be due to network effects within a culture that cause thought leaders to reinforce old ways of doing business, rather than adopting new ways, until some tipping point is achieved.

One of the leading researchers in DI, Siegfried Engelmann, describes the educational community's adoption patterns this way: "Decision makers don't choose a plan because they know it works," he says. "They choose a plan because it's consistent with their vision of what they think kids should do." Most educators have "a greater investment in romantic notions about children" than they do "in the gritty detail of actual practice or the fact that some things work well." Simply put, cultures often have values that are self-reinforcing, and individuals who work against those values can have a very difficult time implementing change.

Would you be willing to adopt a method in performing your work that you didn't like, even if it had been shown in statistical testing to be effective? Returning again to Super Crunchers:

Direct Instruction has faced severe opposition from educators on the ground. They criticize the script as turning teachers into robots, and for striving to make education "teacher proof." Can you blame them for resisting? Would you want to have to follow a script most of your working day, repeating ad nauseam stale words of encouragement and correction? Most teachers are taught that they should be creative. It is a stock movie genre to show teachers getting through to kids with unusual and idiosyncratic techniques (think To Sir with Love, Stand and Deliver, Music of the Heart, Mr. Holland's Opus). No one's going to make a motivational drama about Direct Instruction...

The education establishment is wedded to its pet theories regardless of what the evidence says. Education theorist and developer of the Success for All teaching model Robert Slavin puts it this way: "Research or no research, many schools would say that's just not a program that fits with their philosophy." For many in the education establishment, philosophy trumps results....

In part, the struggle in education is a struggle over power... The education establishment and the teacher on the line want to keep their authority to decide what happens in the classroom. Engelmann and the mandate of "scientifically based" research are a direct threat to that power. Teachers in the classroom realize that their freedom and discretion to innovate is threatened... It's not just the teacher's power and discretion that is at stake. Status and power often go hand in hand.

There are no good studies indicating that "balanced learning" materials perform as well as Direct Instruction, but that doesn't keep states from disqualifying DI as even an option for local school adoption. At the moment, Direct Instruction, the oldest and most validated program, has captured only a little more than 1 percent of the grade-school market. Will this share rise as the empirical commands of NCLB are more fully realized? In the immortal words of "The Pet Goat," "more to come."

When they stick with it, teachers (and parents) are usually enthusiastic supporters of DI in the end. But the transformation is not fun, and is anything but certain; it just produces results when it is followed. Some might say that's why they call it work; but saying that, unfortunately, won't accelerate change by itself; the hearts and minds of the thought leaders in the organization (and their unions) must be won over.

As a contrast, consider another change, in a different area, in which the self-interests of the parties were directly engaged in making the change. Historically, mortality in war has been a constant battle between the effectiveness of technology to kill people and the effectiveness of technology to avoid being killed. Mortality rates in battle have gradually improved from 40%, at the time of the Civil War, to about 20% during the Vietnam war, and remained constant until the latest War in Iraq.

In Iraq, medical teams have successfully improved the survival rate of battlefield wounds from 80% to 90% during the course of the war itself, with nearly all of these changes due not to technology (such as better armor), but from leaning out the system which delivered troops from the Forward Response Surgical Teams in the battlefield, to hospitals in the United States. Excerpts from book Better describe this transformation in thinking, and the required diligence and commitment of those involved in this change:

The system took some getting used to. Surgeons at every level initially tended to hold on to their patients, either believing that they could provide definitive care themselves or not trusting that the next level could do so. ("Trust no one" is the mantra we all learn to live by in surgical training.) According to statistics from Walter Reed, during the first few months of the war it took the most severely injured soldiers - those who clearly needed prolonged and extensive care - an average of eight days to go from the battlefield to a U.S. facility. Gradually, however, surgeons embraced the wisdom of the approach. The average time from battlefield to arrival in the United States is now less than four days. (In Vietnam, it was forty-five days.) And the system has worked...

With Operation Phantom Fury, as the military called the November battle for Fallujah, the Central Surgical Hospital was strained almost to the breaking point. "The wounded came in waves of five, ten, fifteen every two hours," Murphy says. The CSH had twenty-five beds in the ER, five operating tables, and one critical care team, and that did not seem nearly enough. But it did.

Six hundred and nine American soldiers were wounded in the first six days of the November battle. Nonetheless, the military teams managed to keep the overall death rate at just 10 percent. Of 1,100 American soldiers wounded during the twin battles for Fallujah, the teams saved all but 104 - a stunning accomplishment. And it was only possible through a kind of resolute diligence that is difficult to imagine. Think, for example, about the fact that we even know the statistics of what happened to the wounded in Fallujah. It is only because the medical teams took the time, despite the chaos and their fatigue, to fill out their logs describing the injuries and their outcomes. At the 31st CSH, three senior physicians took charge of collecting the data; they input more than seventy-five different pieces of information on every casualty - all so they could later analyze the patterns in what had happened to the soldiers and how effective the treatments had been. "We had a little doctors' room with two computers," Murphy recalls. "I remember I'd see those guys late at night, sometimes in the early hours of the morning, putting the data in."

Few institutions ask their doctors to collect this information. Doctors don't have time, I am tempted to say. But then I remember those surgeons in Baghdad in the dark hours at their PCs. Knowing their results was so important to them that they skipped sleep to gather the data. They understood that such vigilance over the details of their own performance - the same kind of vigilance practiced by WHO physicians working to eradicate polio from the world and the Pittsburgh VA hospital units seeking to eliminate hospital infections - offered the only chance to do better.

There are good resources available about how to overcome fear of change. In applying such ideas, it should become evident that different cultures, and individuals in those cultures, will be capable of adopting change at different rates (see Diffusion of innovations). These factors must be taken into account in realistic planning about the rate of change which will actually be able to be achieved in any cultural transformation.