The Abt Associates' final report on the Follow-Through Planned Variation Experiment is defended against the critique published by a blue ribbon panel funded by the Ford Foundation. In contrast to the conclusions drawn by House, Glass, McLean, and Walker that Follow Through showed no "winners" or "losers", the National Evaluation significance data show clearly that direct instruction outperformed other approaches on nearly all measures. Furthermore, a simple examination of normative data for the direct instruction model in comparison to eight other major models, shows that the children in the direct instruction model are at or near national norms on all Metropolitan Achievement Test (MAT) measures at the end of third grade. The conclusions drawn from these analyses are also supported by a reanalysis by Bereiter and Kurland. (Author/MH)