"Pricklies" vs. "Gooeys"

By Ellie McGarth

Conflicting theories of learning in the wake of Head Start

Project Follow Through began in 1967. Its aim was to continue in kindergarten and up through third grade the gains that underprivileged children had made in Lyndon Johnson's Head Start program--in education, medical care and parental involvement.

Like most Great Society efforts, Follow Through survived on a year-to-year basis, largely because concerned parents lobbied for its funding. This fall, at their annual conference in Ypsilanti, Mich., Follow Through directors were glum. Though this year's program managed to survive Reaganomic budget cutting and win authorization for $45 million for fiscal 1982, federal money is due to dry up in 1984. When the states take charge of federal funds through block grants, Follow Through may fall by the wayside.

Since 1967, about 400,000 students from low-income families in all 50 states have been enrolled in Follow Through classrooms at a cost of $700 million. The program, which involves a partnership between schools, parents and sponsoring research institutions, seems to have worked well for underprivileged children. But it serves another important role: as a laboratory for American pedagogy. In working with various teaching methods, Follow Through has fostered a wide variety of models. It also has added further fuel to what is still one of the hottest debates in U.S. education. Which is superior: what is known as low-structure teaching (education through experience) or high-structure instruction (stress on drill in the basics)? Many low-structure advocates, sometimes described as "gooeys," follow the theory, developed since 1920 by New York City's Bank Street College of Education, that learning must adapt to the pace of the individual child. Under this system children learn to read by being provided with a rich environment that stimulates them to learn the words they need. Many high-structure people, known in the trade as "pricklies," use the DISTAR program (for Direct Instruction Systems for Teaching and Remediation) developed at the University of Oregan. DISTAR sticks to phonics, a tightly programmed curriculum and lots of drill. Children learn how to form new words by sounding out letters, rather than by just recognizing familiar ones.

Though some Follow Through models combine teaching elements from both methods, many classrooms tend to be readily identifiable as either prickly or gooey. Follow Through classes at the Weeksville School, P.S. 243 in Brooklyn, for instance, are colorful, but seem a bit chaotic. In Teresa Van Exel's second-grade class, various groups do different things at the same time. The second grade has chosen the apple as this year's theme, and in one corner, Van Exel conducts a science class for eight children on how apples were stored for winter during the 1800s. Meanwhile, in the classroom's kitchen area, several children are busy making two apple pies. Other children simply wander about the room or work alone. One girl, busy with her phonics workbook, is stuck on the word mud. She can sound out m, u and d;she cannot seem to link the sounds together.

In the Cambridge, Mass., Harrington Elementary School, the gooey classrooms are broken down into "learning centers." In one, a first-grader fits pieces of an alphabet puzzle together. Near by, two girls dressed up in oversized high-heel shoes set a dinner table. A small group, with a teaching assistant acting as secretary, dictates words that will eventually make a whole story. Says Teacher Louise Grant: "Children need opportunities to express their own thoughts. The learning process is easier because there is an interest."

At Dort Elementary School in Flint, Mich., 25 Follow Through kindergarten children sit quietly in neat rows working on assignments. At the front of the room the teacher is drilling four children on reading. Imperious, she snaps her fingers to signal for the answer, which the children chorus together. The children seem secure and interested, but they know they will not be asked for an individual response until after the chorus. When it is time to read, they follow a bright red arrow across the page from left to right to remind them that reading is done from left to right.

At P.S. 137 in Brooklyn School District 23, traditionally the lowest-achieving of all New York City districts in reading, a prickly Follow Through class is doing well. Eight children sit in a reading group in Sadie Martin's first-grade classroom. Martin holds up a manual with words printed in DlSTAR's script. Silent letters are written smaller than the rest. Consonant clusters, like wh, are joined together to indicate that they should be pronounced together. At Martin's signal, the group choruses the sound and then puts the word together phonetically.

The most recent national evaluation, much disputed as to methods, was released in 1977 and indicated that in most of the areas tested--vocabulary, spelling, grammar and math--the pricklies left the gooeys in the dust. However, a more recent local study of comparable New York City neighborhood schools showed gooeys and pricklies scoring about the same. Gooeys consistently argue that standard paper-and-pencil achievement tests are narrow and cannot measure the wide-ranging benefits of their creative approach.

Gail Hurst, a teacher for twelve years in San Diego, transferred out of a DISTAR program after three months. Says she: "I didn't like the robot, parroting answers the students had to give. " Yet DlSTAR's striking results led San Diego Superior Court Judge Louis Welsh last year to request the program to help upgrade minority schools. Joan Gutkin, Follow Through coordinator at New York's P.S. 1 37, points out that 70% of her second-graders in 1980 scored above the 50th percentile on the California Achievement Test, in contrast to only 1 8% of the children in a comparable school. Says she: "I can guarantee that every child will learn to read." In 1981, that is quite a promise.

With reporting by Linda Di Pietro, Jeanne Marie

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