Whether you’re aware of it or not, there’s a battle raging out there in our public schools; the fight for supremacy between rogue and real science. Former special education department chair at the University of Virginia, James Kauffman has been on the front lines of this skirmish for a good part of his career. According to Kauffman, “science has been neglected and abused in education too often in favor of pseudo-science, whereas a real science of education is our best and only hope for our educational future.” Best practices, like Direct Instruction, are set aside in favor of practices that Kauffman calls “voodoo science” like Inventive Spelling. In this book, Kauffman shows readers the stark differences between rogue and real science, and notes how, sadly, great breakthroughs in research-based approaches like Direct Instruction are ignored in favor of trendy oddities like Discovery Learning and Whole Language, approaches that have been proven to fail in repeated studies.
