In Part 1, we looked at the history of Direct Instruction (DI), the original scripted curriculum pioneered by Siegfried Englemann in the 1960s for economically disadvantaged preschool children. Englemann’s model didn’t immediately achieve widespread acceptance. Madeline Hunter’s instructional model arose at nearly the same time but was more far-reaching, possibly because it relied on a specific, easily disseminated format for delivering content and cost nothing to implement. However, commercial curriculum companies piggybacking on Englemann’s ideas began creating curricula that attempted to replicate his work. These programs were adopted here and there but were often strongly resisted by teachers until about 2000, when they got a big – and undeserved — boost.
The Impact of Legislation
Why 2000? The short answer is NCLB (No Child Left Behind). The longer answer is that NCLB misinterpreted (perhaps willfully) a 2000 study conducted by the National Reading Panel (NRP) that was trying to determine the most effective strategies and activities for teaching reading. The NRP admitted it was not able to identify such strategies, did not endorse scripted programs, and stated quite clearly that more research was needed in this area. Despite all those caveats, NCLB legislators included in the 2002 legislation that “scientifically-based” reading programs and materials must be used K-3 by any school receiving Title I funding to ensure that every child will be able to read at grade level by the end of third grade, effectively limiting school districts to commercially-designed* reading programs and significantly narrowing the selection of teaching methods that could be used1. It’s worth noting that “scientifically based” as a defining characteristic is very imprecise and its interpretation has undergone a lot of change in the last 20 years, encompassing widely divergent and sometimes diametrically opposed definitions. Still, companies were quick to begin marketing their products as “scientifically based” with sometimes questionable (or nonexistent) support for those claims.
Even then, the use of scripted curricula didn’t immediately take over. Experienced, competent teachers continued to resist their use, deeming them unnecessary – which, for a competent, experienced teacher, they were.** Successful districts that were doing well on national standardized tests like ITBS or CAT or national hybrid standardized/criterion referenced tests like MAP also were slow to adopt them. Where they really began to crop up was in Title I schools and schools not making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), most of which were low-income schools with high populations of Black and Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) students. These schools, already dealing with staff retention issues and a shortage of experienced teachers, were more or less forced to adopt scripted programs to receive funding. What began to emerge was a pattern where low-income schools and schools with high concentrations of students of color were being forced to use scripted content while mostly White, wealthier schools were still using teacher-designed lessons around content that might be more tailored to student needs and interests (equally, it might not, but at least the potential and opportunity were there). This disparity wasn’t immediately or even necessarily recognized as a problem; it was just one more strand in a cluster of systemic inequities experienced by BIPOC and poor students, though not necessarily one with malicious intent.
Enter Covid 19
What really boosted scripted curricula was the Covid 19 pandemic. When instruction moved online and parents began paying attention to what their children were learning and being asked to do to demonstrate that learning, it sparked a wave of criticism around content, methods, and student work expectations that almost certainly didn’t resemble what students had been doing in classrooms prior to the pandemic. That criticism was stoked by a lot of on-line rage-baiting and may mostly have come from people who didn’t actually have kids in the public schools at all. Judging what teachers were doing during a period when many were being asked to pivot to online instruction without much support or guidance or even infrastructure to do so was manifestly unfair, but not acknowledged at the time. Out of that unpleasant morass came three things:
- A lot of teachers who left teaching because of the criticism and lack of support,
- A desire on the part of parents – and then state legislatures — to more strictly control what was going on in classrooms, and
- Significant learning loss in students that desperately needed to be addressed.***
The first problem created a serious shortage of teachers in classrooms across the country and the response to that was states reducing the requirements for teaching to allow those who did not have a license or sometimes even a bachelor’s degree to take over responsibility for classrooms. Many districts exploited loopholes in their licensure requirements to allow many more people to work toward licensure – and sometimes toward that bachelor’s degree – while teaching (and being paid to teach) already. The result of this has been an influx of undereducated, untrained teachers, sometimes more than any one school or even whole district can adequately support. Scripted curricula seemed like a good way to solve the problem of supporting this kind of teacher and the second problem (control of content) at the same time: they offered a step-by step (and often phrase-by-phrase) guide to what should be said and done in the classroom. Theoretically, scripts would support inexperienced teachers^^, ensure consistency of instruction for students, and address the second problem by tightly controlling the content, so long as the teacher didn’t deviate from it in any way. What’s really interesting is that there has been a similar rise in the use of scripted curricula in other Western countries. TES Magazine in the UK noted this rising use in 2017 – before Covid – and cited an insufficiently-prepared workforce as a possible reason. This dovetails with what we are seeing now in the U.S..
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* This was a masterstroke of lobbying by industry giants. It’s baffling that legislators assumed publishing companies knew the best way to teach reading when research had just confirmed they did not.
** This is generally true; a highly competent teacher can take a child who isn’t “getting it” and try different approaches and methodologies until the child is able to master the content. These teachers simply don’t need the extensive support of a scripted program. I wasn’t able to find information on how Englemann felt about teachers adapting his scripts to meet their students’ needs.
*** More on this here, here, and here.
^^Many of these programs are actually marketed as “teacher-proof,” which is as insulting as it is disturbing. It also contributes to the de-professionalization of teachers, essentially relegating them to content delivery mechanisms instead of competent professionals.
1 Dresser, R. (2012). The impact of scripted literacy instruction on teachers and students. Issues in Teacher Education, 21 (1), 71-87.