A quote in the Alfie Kohn article linked in TFA is, although anecdotal, particularly damning of DI: > Reporters for the New York Times and Education Week visit

A quote in the Alfie Kohn article linked in TFA is, although anecdotal, particularly damning of DI: > Reporters for the New York Times and Education Week visited Direct Instruction (DI) classrooms — in North Carolina and Texas, respectively — and coincidentally published their accounts in the same month, June 1998. The Education Week reporter found that sixth-grade students, successfully trained to do well on the main standardized test used in Texas, couldn’t explain what was going on in the book they were reading or even what the title meant. Apparently, she concluded, “mastering reading skills does not guarantee comprehension.” The Times reporter had been told by the for-profit company running a DI-style school that all of their kindergartners had been trained to read. “All you have to remember” as a teacher, he was told, “is that you can’t go off the script.” But when the reporter showed the children “something basic they’d never seen,” they couldn’t make heads or tails of it. A regimented drill-and-skill approach had trained them to “read” only what had been on the teachers’ script.[7]