When was the Follow Through educational program introduced?
Follow Through (project)
Lack of systematic selection of interventions and lack of specificity of treatment effects. Due to a variety of circumstances detailed earlier, the Follow Through programs were not systematically developed or selected according to any type of uniform criteria.[4]:6, 15 Given more time, sponsors may have been able to better identify the types of treatment effects that an observer might expect to occur under controlled conditions. More importantly, program sponsors might also have been required to show those specific facets of their interventions (e.g., particular pedagogical techniques) which would produce the intended effects. Despite these flaws, the sponsors agreed on being subject to the same evaluation instruments. Unfortunately, the instruments shed little light on what about the ineffective programs made them so unsuccessful. The converse is also true. Since structured programs tended to show better effects than the unstructured ones, it would appear logical that efforts might have been made to identify commonalities among the effective structured programs. These shared characteristics might have informed the development of additional effective programs or made the ineffective approaches better.  Starting in 1982, funding was in fact reduced for those programs that were identified as successful in Follow Through, perhaps on the presumption that funding would be better diverted to assisting failed programs.[3] Ultimately, programs that had lesser empirical validation were nonetheless recommended for dissemination along with the successful models.