I taught my 4 year old to read English through the book. She's far ahead in reading amongst her peer group (English is not our native language). I know sounds cheesy, but please count me in for exchanging ideas or fixing education using his methods.
You have valid point on his work being assessed and valorized in studies, but parent's point also stands stronger in my mind. The ratio of actual experience in the field vs spending time telling people what to do is pretty surprising.
I'm just stating that this particular book, in a 1:1 parent:child setting, has a great track record. 100 days of spending 10-15 minutes with your kid doing these lessons is a low risk intervention with tremendous upside. You don't have to have a teaching background to utilize it (the intro for parents is fairly extensive and important pre-reading), you just follow the parental directions.
>While working as a marketing director in the early 1960s, Engelmann became interested with how children learn.
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>In 1964, he left his job in advertising and became a research associate
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>In 1970, he moved from the University of Illinois to the University of Oregon in Eugene, becoming a Professor in the University's College of Education.[2][3]
He was never a public school teacher, although he may have taught students as a research associate. He was apparently teaching as a hobbyist, including homeschooling.
The kerfuffle about whether he was "actually teaching", however, actually misses the point. While you can, at least in principle, understand the experience of a student by experimenting on students, you will never understand the experience of a teacher by experimenting on students. Whatever method you come up with or promote must ultimately be implemented by real flesh-and-blood humans working under real constraints (including the limits of their own abilities and emotions) with realistic organizational and community dynamics. This is what I interpreted the original complaint about researchers versus engineers as analogized to software development to mean.
> you will never understand the experience of a teacher by experimenting on students
I'm not sure to follow, wouldn't you at least understand your own experience as a teacher by actually teaching to students ?
Englemann, along with another educational researcher, Douglas Carnine, authored a word call Theory of Instruction, which is as disciplined and scientific a work as you can find in a "soft" subject like education, and expounds the theoretical basis behind their effective methods.