Val- I'm having trouble finding a specific link for you. Open Court Reading is published by SRA McGraw-Hill and is vaguely referred to on their website and in their "Direct Instruction" section. They are also doing a national study to determine the effectiveness of Open Court and Everyday Math.
Open Court was implemented in many CA schools in the early 2000s. Lots of schools are still using it either because they liked it or they didn't have cash to replace it. It is a scripted, direct instruction curriculum. In districts that required implementation and did not allow teachers to deviate, it is a fully scripted program that does not allow teachers to change, modify or move away from the text. And by fully scripted, I mean it says "Students, now we will read the next work. Read ___. Good. What word is the next word? ___. Good." As originally published, it came with a clicker to cue student response, like in clicker training for dogs. Really.
The biggest complaints I heard from teachers at the time, was that you had to read the same story for five days in K and 1st. It didn't allow the teachers to change anything and there were assignments that went with the story. It took an average of one and a half hours to get through the daily lesson. If you had an assembly or field trip etc, you had to double up on a day to catch back up again.
You can see samples on Amazon.
