Nearly 100 pre-k students in Texas have reason to be proud of their newfound reading and language skills. IDEA Pharr Academy in Pharr, Texas introduced a pre-kindergarten pilot program featuring Direct Instruction programs with the goal of reducing the achievement gap and ensuring students begin kindergarten on grade level. 80% of Pharr Academy’s students speak Spanish as their first language, and nearly all students, 97.3%, come from low socioeconomic backgrounds.

The year began with eight groups of students in Español to English and four more groups in DISTAR Language. Pharr’s goal for the half-day pilot program was for all students to  complete Español to English or DISTAR by the end of the year and be primed for starting Reading Mastery Signature Edition (RMSE) language and reading programs in the fall. With over 30 instructional days remaining until year’s end, 66 of the 99 pre-k pilot program students have already started RMSE K – some having completed over 60 lessons! The other 33 students are finishing up Español to English and are a few lessons away from being ready to placement test for RMSE.

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John McWhorter, a professor at Columbia University, recently presented the keynote speech at the Cato Institute half-day conference on ending poverty. One of the pillars to his solution? Direct Instruction!

McWhorter said there were three things that needed to be done in order to end poverty for African Americans in the United States and touted Direct Instruction as the premier program for teaching all inner city kids how to read as one of those solutions. He also suggested encouraging young Americans to wait to start families until they had established careers and ending the war on drugs as two other meaningful methods.

Watch the video above to see McWhorter's remarks for yourself. Note: John begins his comments on Direct Instruction at 29:30 into the talk and at about 55 minutes, discusses why seemingly no one knows about DI.

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by PAIGE TAYLOR
The Australian
March 21, 2015 12:00AM
 

FIVE hundred Martu children at five schools in the Pilbara desert have become the biggest cluster of Australian students to begin learning under the Direct Instruction teaching method cham­pioned by Cape York leader Noel Pearson, and there are early signs of big change.

In northeast Western Australia this week to see the highly scripted method in classrooms outside Cape York for the first time, Mr. Pearson declared there was a moral imperative in the program’s continued rollout to remot­e schools, where so many students have failed to achieve.

“We have got a great moral purpose here, a moral purpose for the survival of these communities and these people,” he said.

As remote communities across Western Australia brace for selec­t­ive closures threatened by Premier Colin Barnett, Mr. Pearson linked the communities’ future to education. “The Martu have the same vision as I have for my ­people, which is for them to live long on their land,” he says.

“The whole question of the via­bility of these remote communit­ies rests on making schools work."

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Has your district received training and on-site coaching support for implementing Direct Instruction (DI), and is now looking for ways of maintaining the implementation with a high level of fidelity?  

The Institute on Becoming an Effective DI Trainer at the National Direct Instruction Conference (July 27-31, 2015) can help your school or district expand its capacity for providing training and support to the DI implementation by developing on-site trainers.

Read more about the training or download the application here.