The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town
“Although you do not know his name, Siegfried (Zig) Engelmann is one of the most talked-about authors in the country right now. His most prominent work, which you have not read, is a story for second graders. It begins, “A girl got a pet goat.”
Engelmann’s book is the one that President Bush was reading to a class of children on 9/11. Engelmann is the developer of Direct Instruction, a controversial teaching method.
“We don’t give a damn what the teacher thinks, what the teacher feels,” Engelmann said. “On the teachers’ own time they can hate it. We don’t care, as long as they do it.” Engelmann claims that Direct Instruction is one of the few teaching methods that have been consistently shown to improve student achievement, especially among disadvantaged children. “Traditionalists die over this,” he said. “But in terms of data we whump the daylights out of them.”