From the
NYT article:
Federal officials who ran Reading First maintain that only curriculums including regular, systematic phonics lessons had the backing of “scientifically based reading research” required by the program.
But in a string of blistering reports, the Education Department’s inspector general has found that federal officials may have violated prohibitions in the law against mandating, or even endorsing, specific curriculums. The reports also found that federal officials overlooked conflicts of interest among the contractors that advised states applying for grants, and that in some instances, these contractors wrote reading programs competing for the money, and stood to collect royalties if their programs were chosen.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has said that the problems in Reading First occurred largely before she took over in 2005, and that her office has new guidelines for awarding grants. She declined a request for an interview.
This has been cooking for a while, and, quite conveniently, was hidden from the news in the run-up to the 2006 election. In my best Gomer Pyle voice,
Surprise, surprise, surprise!From
http://librarian.lishost.org/?p=559">Librarian Bush Reading Program Rife with Fraud. “Direct Instruction” at Eye of the Storm. No. 9.23.2006. 196.A scorching internal review of the Bush administration’s reading program says the Education Department ignored the law and ethical standards to steer money the way it wanted.The government audit is unsparing in its review of how the billion-dollar-a-year Reading First program has been beset by conflicts of interest and willful mismanagement.
It suggests the department broke the law by trying to dictate which curriculum the schools must use.The report in full is availabale in pdf:
The Reading First Program’s Grant Application Process:
ED-OIG/I13-F0017.September 2006
While Not Required to Screen for Conflicts of Interest, the Screening Process the Department Created Was Not Effective.
The Department Did Not Follow Its Own Guidance For the Peer Review Process
The Department Included Requirements in the Criteria Used by the Expert Review Panels That Were Not Specifically Addressed in NCLB
* Developed an application package that obscured the requirements of the statute;
* Took action with respect to the expert review panel process that was contrary to the balanced panel composition envisioned by Congress;
* Intervened to release an assessment review document without the permission of the entity that contracted for its development;
* Intervened to influence a State’s selection of reading programs; and
* Intervened to influence reading programs being used by LEAs after the application process was completed.
These actions demonstrate that the program officials failed to maintain a control environment that exemplifies management integrity and accountability.
The Reading First Director (Chris Doherty) stated:
“Beat the (expletive deleted) out of them in a way that will stand up to any level of legal and apologist scrutiny. Hit them over and over with definitive evidence that they are not SBRR, never have been and never will be. They are trying to crash our party and we need to beat the (expletive deleted) out of them in front of all the other would-be party crashers who are standing on the front lawn waiting to see how we welcome these dirtbags.”— . Reading First, finishing lastThe Carpetbagger ReportFebruary 23, 2007
Following up on an issue we first discussed six months ago,
Reading First is not just another grant program in the Department of Education. According to the cabinet agency’s website, it is “the academic cornerstone of the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act.” Reading First, the Department of Education has argued “is a prime example of the No Child Left Behind law’s emphasis on programs and teaching methods that have been proven to work.”
As the “academic cornerstone” of its education policy, the administration has been funding the reading program with some enthusiasm. Over the last four years, about 1,500 school districts have received $4.8 billion in Reading First grants.
All of this matters because, as it turns out, the Bush administration ran the program the same way it does practically everything — with incompetence and ineptitude.
Top Education Department officials, including former Secretary Rod Paige, allowed specialists to improperly encourage state and local officials to spend billions of dollars in federal grant money with a small group of companies, government investigators have concluded. In educating state and local officials about the department’s Reading First grant program, officials loaded expert panels with speakers who overwhelmingly preferred products from a handful of educational companies, according to a report released yesterday by the Education Department’s inspector general.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2007/02/study_bias_by_t.htmlAs ABC’s Justin Rood explained, the Department of Education is prohibited from interfering with curriculum decisions by state and local education officials. But when it came to Reading First, Bush’s political appointees would pick favored companies, then push state and local education officials to buy their products and services.
And wouldn’t you know it, the favored companies happened to be headed by Bush donors.
The IG found that the training programs set up by the Department to educate states about the Reading First program violated the prohibition against controlling individual school curricula by promoting specific reading materials and instructions to the financial of benefit companies – such as McGraw Hill and Voyager – headed by top Bush administration donors. The IG also found that the Department failed to adequately assess “issues of bias and objectivity” in approving technical assistance providers.
In response to the report, CREW’s Executive Director Melanie Sloan said: “It is becoming increasingly clear that the Bush administration has been sacrificing the education of children to financially benefit a select group of loyalists and donors. CREW has filed suit to force the Department of Education to come clean about the extent to which cronyism and corruption have permeated the Reading First panels, potentially depriving our nation’s highest risk children of the best possible reading materials.”
http://blog.citizensforethics.org/node/635For example, McGraw-Hill’s Chairman and CEO, Harold McGraw III, and its Chairman Emeritus, Harold McGraw Jr., contributed a total of over $23,000 to the Republican National Committee and to President Bush’s campaigns between 1999 and 2006. Sure enough, the company was pushed during the Education Secretary’s “Readership Language Academies.”
In fact, these official seminars for state and local education officials didn’t just promote favored companies, they also cracked down on companies the Bush gang disapproved of.
In one particularly amusing example, Reading First director Chris Doherty wrote an email to a staff member, urging the aide to come down hard on a company he didn’t support. “They are trying to crash our party and we need to beat the (expletive deleted) out of them in front of all the other would-be party crashers who are standing on the front lawn waiting to see how we welcome these dirtbags,” Doherty wrote.
By the way, the same director told a Senate committee his program did not give certain companies preferential treatment. He appears to have been lying.
.....
And, for the record:
Florida received $57 million in federal Reading First funds, which will total over $300 million in six years, to help reach Governor Bush's goal that every child read at or above grade level by 2012.
---"Being a successful reader is the first building block to lifelong learning"
- Governor Jeb Bush
http://www.justreadflorida.com/reading_first.aspWonder how all of this *might connect* with Neil Bush's
Ignite! computer educational program.... we all know how important literacy is to the BFEE. :sarcasm:
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