  |
A collection
of national news articles and editorials about the corrupt practices
that provoked the U. S. Education Department's Inspector General to investigate
and the subsequent scathing report on the appointees at Reading First
and their favored friends in the publishing industry. Most recent articles
can be found at higher pages, older items on the lower pages.
|
The most lethal blow to Reading First came from the government's
own hand—
the Department of Education's research arm, delivered
May 1, 2008, days after
Secty. Spellings had described
Reading First as "highly effective."
An Initiative
on Reading Is Rated Ineffective
By Sam Dillon,
The New York Times, May 2, 2008
President Bush’s
$1 billion a year initiative to teach reading to low-income
children has not helped improve their reading comprehension,
according to a Department of Education report released
on Thursday.
“The Bush
administration has put cronyism first and the reading
skills of our children last."
The
program, known as Reading First, drew on some of Mr.
Bush’s educational
experiences as Texas governor, and at his insistence
Congress included it in the federal No Child Left Behind
legislation that passed by bipartisan majorities in 2001.
It has been a subject of dispute almost ever since, however,
with the Bush administration and some state officials
characterizing the program as beneficial for young
students, and Congressional Democrats and federal investigators
criticizing conflict of interest among its top advisers.
“Reading
First did not improve students’ reading
comprehension,” concluded the report, which was
mandated by Congress and carried out by the Department
of Education’s research arm, the Institute of Education
Sciences. “The program did not increase the percentages
of students in grades one, two or three whose reading
comprehension scores were at or above grade level.”
The
study, “Reading First Impact Study: Interim
Report,” analyzes the performance of students in
12 states who were in grades one to three during the
2004-5 and 2005-6 school years. It is to be followed
early in 2009 with a final report that will analyze additional
follow-up data, the institute’s director, Grover
J. Whitehurst said.
Secretary of Education
Margaret Spellings and President Bush have consistently
extolled Reading First as a highly effective program.
But last year, Congressional Democrats reduced financing
for the program for this year by about 60 percent,
to about $400 million from the $1 billion it had received
in several previous years.
On Thursday, Ms. Spellings had no comment on the study.
Amanda Farris, a deputy assistant secretary of education,
said in a statement that Ms. Spellings planned to look
at the study “to inform our efforts,” and
would “look forward to reviewing the final report.”
Ms.
Farris said that one of the consistent messages Ms. Spellings
has heard from educators, principals and state administrators “is
about the effectiveness of the Reading First program
in their schools and their disappointment with Congress” for
cutting its financing.
Senator Edward
M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman
of the education committee, and who has long criticized
the program, said, “The
Bush administration has put cronyism first and the reading
skills of our children last, and this report shows the
disturbing consequences.”
In 2006, John
Higgins, the department’s inspector
general, reported that federal officials and private
contractors with ties to publishers had advised educators
in several states to buy reading materials for the Reading
First program from those publishers.
The Reading First
director, Chris Doherty, resigned in 2006, days before
the release of Mr. Higgins’s
report, which disclosed a number of e-mail messages in
which Mr. Doherty referred to contractors or educators
who favored alternative curriculums seen as competitors
to the Reading First approach as “dirtbags” who
he said were “trying to crash our party.”
Study: Reading First has little impact
on kids' scores
Participants' skills on par with other
students'
By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY, May
2, 2008
A $1-billion-a-year reading program
that has been a pillar of the Bush administration's education
plan doesn't have much impact on young people's reading
skills, a long-awaited federal study shows.
The results,
issued Thursday, could be a knockout punch for the 6-year-old
Reading First program: Congress has already cut funding
60% after investigating whether top advisers improperly
benefited from contracts for textbooks and testing materials
they designed.
Advocates of Reading First, an integral
part of the 2002 No Child Left Behind law, have long
said its emphasis on phonics, scripted instruction and
detailed analyses of children's skills would raise reading
achievement, especially among the low-income kids it
targets.
However, the study by the U.S. Education
Department's Institute of Education Sciences (IES) shows
that children in schools getting Reading First funding
had no better reading skills than those in schools that
didn't get the funding.
The large-scale study looked at
students in first through third grade from 2004 through
2006, IES Director Russ Whitehurst said.
On the positive
side, the researchers found that Reading First teachers
spent more time on phonics and other aspects of reading
instruction that many experts now recommend — about
10 minutes more a day, or nearly an hour more a week.
"Teachers'
behavior was changed," Whitehurst
said.
Even so, for all their effort, the
study shows, their students' reading scores on standardized
tests were nearly identical to those of students in other
schools. In many cases, they may have been using the
same materials, but their teachers may not have received
the same training.
"For all intents and purposes,
the kids read at the same level in each grade," Whitehurst
said.
Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., said
the report, "coupled
with the scandals revealed last year, shows that we need
to seriously re-examine this program and figure out how
to make it work better for students."
Critics will
most likely use the data to paint Reading First as an
expensive failure, but Whitehurst said it may suggest
that schools need to spend even more time on phonics
and the like.
Whitehurst also noted that school districts
may use up to 20% of their Reading First funding outside
of Reading First schools to improve reading skills districtwide.
Mike
Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington
think tank that supports Reading First, called the study
poorly designed and "certainly not the last word" on
Reading First's effectiveness. For one thing, he said,
it looked at "lackluster" schools that barely
qualified for grants.
Whitehurst said he stands by the
research.
Thursday's results are from an interim
study; a more complete analysis, which followed students
through the 2006-07 school year, is expected in November.
U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said Congress
should wait until then before making decisions about
the program. "Moving
the needle on reading is a hard thing to do. … I
don't think anyone's going to assert that the cure will
be less focus and fewer resources."
PDF copy
of the Inspector General's report:
http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oig/aireports/i13f0017.pdf. |
