[1]: 7 Follow Through was originally intended to be an extension of the federal Head Start program, which delivered educational, health, and social services to typically disadvantaged preschool children and their families.
In President Lyndon B. Johnson's 1967 state of the union address, he proposed $120 million for the program, to serve approximately 200,000 children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
It was generally hypothesized that the mere provision of specific supports in the form of federal compensatory programs—such as Head Start and Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—would result in increased academic achievement for disadvantaged children, if implemented faithfully by committed teachers.
However, studies had shown that despite its successes, in general any gains that children made from Head Start (in measures of academic achievement) "faded out" during the first few years of elementary school.
Subsequently, effective models were to be promulgated by the government as exemplars of innovative and proven methods of raising the academic achievement of historically disadvantaged students.
[4]: 2 In addition to the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, other initiatives included economic policies designed to maintain levels of high employment and federally subsidized job training specifically targeted at people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
At its height, the program would grow to encompass 20 different sponsored interventions and approximately 352,000 Follow Through and comparison children in 178 projects nationwide.
However, CAP (and, to some extent, OEO) fell into disrepute among legislators and others, because "it resulted in the political mobilization of the poor and the undermining of local government agencies".
[1]: 9 Due largely to the sociocultural context in which Follow Through was born, planners deliberately structured the program to minimize the involvement of federal officials in the implementation effort.
Developed by Siegfried Engelmann and Wesley Becker of the University of Oregon, direct instruction is scripted and specifies precisely what the teacher says and what the students' responses should be.
The program makes a specific distinction between on-task and off-task behavior: instruction is arranged so that students are fully engaged in learning (via frequent checking for understanding and praises by the teacher) the majority of the time.
[5]: 15–16 Likewise, teachers of the Cognitive Curriculum design their own approaches to instruction (including the specification of learning goals), with assistance from sponsors and fellow staff members.
With the assistance of various state and federal education agencies, 100 communities were invited to apply to the program, based on criteria established by the OEO.
Not coincidentally, the inclusion of several additional districts appears to have been an attempt to satisfy a number of local political figures by including their communities in the program.
[1]: 9 While Elmore laments that sites could have been chosen with a greater degree of scientific rigor (e.g. stratified random sampling), this was impossible, for at least two reasons.
The implication is that the goal of education should not be increased student achievement in solely basic skills, and that Follow Through would have been better employed to discover how measures of all three orientations could be made successful.
Watkins cites the former Commissioner of Education, Ernest Boyer, who wrote with dismay that "Since only one of the sponsors (Direct Instruction) was found to produce positive results more consistently than any of the others, it would be inappropriate and irresponsible to disseminate information on all of the models".
Andy B. Anderson (1975) wrote that "the idea of a controlled experiment has long been recognized as a goal worth pursuing in the social and behavioral sciences for the same obvious reason that made this mode of inquiry the predominant research strategy of the natural and physical sciences: the controlled experiment permits the most unequivocal assessment of a variable's influence on another variable".
[19]: 13 Particularly when experimentation is used as a tool for informing policy decisions (e.g., in recommending the efficacy of some instructional approaches with disadvantaged students over other, less effective interventions), the design should be of the highest degree of rigor possible.
Due to a variety of circumstances detailed earlier, the Follow Through programs were not systematically developed or selected according to any type of uniform criteria.
More importantly, program sponsors might also have been required to show those specific facets of their interventions (e.g., particular pedagogical techniques) which would produce the intended effects.
Random assignment of subjects into treatment and control groups is the ideal method of attributing change in a sample to an intervention and not to some other effect (including the pre-existing capabilities of students, teachers, or school systems).
To randomly select some of the most disadvantaged children (many of whom participated in Head Start prior to Follow Through) out of the evaluation would certainly have been negatively perceived by community members.
To the extent that these desired outcomes occurred, and benefited the lives of students in ways that might never be measurably through quantitative means, those aspects of many models were successful.
[20]: 1–2 An inevitable conflict exists when one attempts to operationalize a federal program in education that possesses both service delivery and research and development objectives.
[1]: 8–9 Rivlin et al. point out that "the byzantine complexity of the public policymaking process makes the conduct of social experiments extremely difficult".
However, if the change is not reflected in Congressional legislation or communicated clearly at the local level, issues of implementation and conflict with deeply held values inevitably result.
The planned variation aspect of Follow Through was thought to be beneficial—perhaps superior—to other forms of experimentation (e.g., selection of sites based on randomized assignment) because it would give local communities and schools an element of ownership integral to the successful implementation of the models.
[22]: 10, 20 Hill writes: "There is seldom anyone at the local level whose commitment to an externally-imposed curricular innovation, planning process, or financial management scheme springs spontaneously from deeply held personal values.
Watkins argues that Follow Through resulted in a clash over values based on different beliefs about how children learn, which can be boiled down to "natural growth" or "unfolding" theories versus.