|
A collection of
national news articles and editorials about the corrupt
practices that provoked the Ed Department's Inspector
General to investigate and the subsequent scathing report on
the appointees at Reading First and their
favored friends in the textbook/testing industry. The
most recent items can be found on higher pages, older
items on the lower pages.
Report Says Education Officials
Violated Rules
The
New York Times, September 23, 2006
By Sam
Dillon
Department of Education officials violated
conflict of interest rules when awarding grants to states
under President Bush’s billion-dollar reading initiative,
and steered contracts to favored textbook publishers, the
department’s
inspector general said yesterday.
In a searing report that
concludes the first in a series of investigations into
complaints of political favoritism in the reading initiative,
known as Reading First, the report said officials improperly
selected the members of review panels that awarded large
grants to states, often failing to detect conflicts of
interest. The money was used to buy reading textbooks and
curriculum for public schools nationwide.
States have received
more than $4.8 billion in Reading First grants during the
Bush administration, and a recent survey by an independent
group, the Center on Education Policy, reported that many
state officials consider the initiative to be highly effective
in raising reading achievement. But the report describes
a tangled process in which some states had to apply for
grants as many as six times before receiving approval,
with department officials scheming to stack panels with
experts tied to favored publishers.
In one e-mail message
cited in the report, from which the inspector general deleted
some vulgarities, the director of Reading First, Chris
Doherty, urged staff members to make clear to one company
that it was not favored at the department.
“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,” Mr.
Doherty wrote.
Mr. Doherty recently resigned from the
department to “return
to the private sector,” Katherine McLane, a department
spokeswoman said.
Officials relayed reporters’ requests
for comment to Mr. Doherty, and he declined to be interviewed,
an official said.
The abuses described in the report occurred
during 2002 and 2003, when Rod Paige was education secretary.
John Grimaldi, spokesman for the Chartwell Education Group
where Mr. Paige is chairman, said he had not read the report
but would seek Mr. Paige’s reaction to it.
“Some
of the actions taken by department officials and described
in the inspector general’s report reflect
individual mistakes,” Secretary Margaret Spellings
said in a statement. “Although these events occurred
before I became secretary of education, I am concerned
about these actions and committed to addressing and resolving
them.”
Officials will review by the end of the
year all Reading First applications that the department
approved, to determine that they met all applicable requirements,
Ms. McLane said.
The report recounts how during the formation
of a review panel in 2002 a journalist asked the department
whether federal officials were trying to stack the panel
so that some reading programs would not be treated fairly.
The
report cited the Reading First director’s response
to the department employee who relayed the journalist’s
question: “Stack the panel? ... I have never heard
of such a thing ....<harumph, harumph>” the
director replied.
“The response,” the report
concluded, “suggests
that he may indeed have intended to ‘stack’ the
expert review panel.”
The report mentions Reid Lyon,
the former chief of a branch of the National Institutes
of Health, who was a research adviser to President Bush
and an architect of Reading First. He exerted immense influence
at the department when Mr. Paige was there.
In 2002, Dr.
Lyon told the Reading First director and other department
officials that a woman whom the department had already
selected to be on a review panel had been “actively
working to undermine” a reading initiative he favored,
the report said.
“Chances are that other reviewers
can trump any bias on her part,” Dr. Lyon told the
officials.
“We can’t uninvite her,” a
senior adviser to Mr. Paige wrote in response, the report
said. “Just
make sure she is on a panel with one of our barracuda types.”
The
incident demonstrated “the intention of the former
senior adviser to the secretary to control another panelist,” the
report said.
In an interview yesterday, Dr. Lyon said
that in the 2002 incident he sought to neutralize bias.
“If
we detected bias, we had to make sure that the review panel
was put together so that that bias would be neutralized,” he
said.
Dr. Lyon left the national institutes
in August 2005 and is now an executive vice president for
Higher Ed Holdings, a company based in Dallas that is working
to found a college of education.
“Oh man, I’m
mortified,” Dr. Lyon said
of the report. “To see the facts that were presented
today was very disappointing, because it’s an outstanding
program.”
The investigation was opened last year
after the inspector general received accusations of mismanagement
and other abuses at the department from publishers of several
reading programs, including Robert E. Slavin, a director
of a research center at the Johns Hopkins University who
is chairman of Success for All, a nonprofit foundation
that produces reading materials.
“The department has
said at least 10,000 times that they had no favored reading
programs, and this report provides clear evidence that
they were very aggressively pressing districts to use certain
programs and not use others,” Dr.
Slavin said.
PDF copy of the Inspector General's report:
http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oig/aireports/i13f0017.pdf.
|
