America has only a few great educators. For the last 50 years, Siegfried Engelmann has been one of them.

His passion was to figure out what worked best in the ordinary classroom for ordinary children. He was, shall we say, in love with practicality and empiricism. You come up with ideas, you test them, and then you refine them. You do not impose your ideas on children until you have proved that your ideas are the best possible ones.

 You might notice at this point that Common Core does everything exactly backwards. They come up with grandiose ideas, don't test them at all, and then impose them on as many millions of children as possible. There is your basic recipe for huge disaster. (Common Core, we see, is exactly like ObamaCare, an answer that is way too big for the question.)

 Anyway, everyone in education should know about Siegfried Engelmann. Here is a short interview with him that gives the basics.

http://www.examiner.com/article/interview-with-siegfried-engelmann-...

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 There may be a profound irony here. Engelmann is much associated with Direct Instruction or scripted instruction. This is the method, he found, that works the best. For decades, the Education Establishment ridiculed this approach because it was said to be uncreative, non-spontaneous, and it would cramp a teacher's style. Please note, they never said it didn't work. The criticism was always intended to pander to the presumed wants of teachers. But here's the weirder part. Common Core is introducing a rigidity of its own, a rigidity that does not work because it's born out of the Establishment's lust for control, not out of research that proves the Establishment knows what it's doing.

WIRED recently ran an article called "Pop-Up Schools Could Radically Improve Global Education," which basically describes an approach almost identical to Engelmann's. So now the little kids in the jungles of Kenya will be educated more successfully than the kids here.