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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.
Scathing
Report Casts Cloud Over ‘Reading First’
Education
Week, September 29, 2006
By Kathleen
Kennedy Manzo
Federal officials encouraged use of specific programs,
inspector general finds.
The findings of a scathing report on the federal Reading
First program continued to reverberate following its Sept.
22 release, fueling debates in Congress, on the Internet,
and among professionals in the field about their gravity
and potential impact.
Critics of the program’s implementation said the
conclusions drawn in the report by the U.S. Department
of Education’s inspector general validate complaints
that federal officials may have steered the grant-application
process to ensure that particular reading programs and
instructional approaches were widely used by participating
schools, and that others were essentially shut out.
Some supporters of the program
characterized the findings as overblown and charged that
they constituted a personal attack on department personnel,
rather than a verdict on the $1 billion-a-year program
itself, which was rolled out 41⁄2 years ago as
part of the No Child Left Behind Act.
Many educators and observers said the blistering review
of the implementation and management of Reading First,
though justified, could damage a program that is showing
initial signs of effectiveness.
“There really needs to be a good, hard look at the
program ... and a renewed focus on solid, research-based
instruction,” said Alan J. Farstrup, the executive
director of the International Reading Association, in Newark,
Del. “Reading First can be a more solid program.”
The long-awaited evaluation, which includes excerpts from
internal Education Department e-mail marked confidential
and sometimes containing vulgar language, concludes that:
- Department
officials may have intended to “stack” the
panels of grant reviewers with those who favored a particular
teaching methodology, and their method of screening the
panelists for conflicts of interest was ineffective;
- Requirements for receiving grants under the program
were expanded beyond what the law requires;
- Federal
education officials may also have overstepped provisions
of the No Child Left Behind Act that prohibit them from
influencing or dictating the curricula, assessments,
or instructional approaches used by schools or districts.
Reading First, which has already
handed out nearly $5 billion in grants to some 1,700
districts and 5,600 schools, is designed to improve reading
instruction in the nation’s
most disadvantaged schools through the use of research-based
methods.
Potential Conflicts
The inspector general’s findings
correspond with charges leveled over the past several
years by critics of the program, as well as by many reading
experts and state officials.
Education Week has reported since 2002 many of the concerns
among researchers and educators that the program favored
only a handful of consultants and commercial products,
and the potential financial conflicts between them. In
an extensive analysis of documents and e-mail correspondence
obtained through state and federal open-records requests,
as well as interviews with state officials, the newspaper
reported last fall a pattern of behavior that suggested
federal employees and their representatives had directed
or even pressured states to choose specific assessments,
consultants, and certain kinds of texts as conditions for
getting funding under Reading First.
Also implicated in the report for
their roles in setting requirements for the program were
Susan B. Neuman, who served as the department’s
assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education
from March 2001 until January 2003 and G. Reid Lyon,
who directed the branch of the National Institute of
Child Health and Human Development that supports reading
research.
Ms. Neuman returned to her job as a reading researcher
at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. Mr. Lyon now
works for Best Associates in Dallas.
In an interview, Ms. Neuman said she was not included
in what she described as closed-door discussions between
Mr. Doherty, other staff members, and consultants as they
drafted guidance for the program and advised state officials
on their grant proposals.
Mr. Lyon said his role was simply to explain and clarify
what the research says is effective in reading instruction.
It is Mr. Doherty’s role
in directing the grant-application process that is outlined
in detail in the report, including e-mail exchanges that
express in sharp wording his disdain for what he viewed
as insufficiently rigorous instructional materials. Just
days before the report was released, Mr. Doherty announced
that he would be leaving his position with the department
Oct. 1 for work in the private sector. He could not be
reached for comment.
The handful of remaining Reading First staff members have
been reassigned within the Education Department, according
to spokesman Chad Colby.
In past interviews with Education
Week, Mr. Doherty has maintained that the department
only pressed state and local officials to meet the law’s
demand for research-based materials, assessments, and
practices, and provided counsel on how they could do
that.
“In fact, what we’ve said about Reading First
is that there is no approved list of programs or assessment,
truthfully,” Mr. Doherty said in an interview last
year.
Beyond the Law?
Some education experts said the Education Department had
no choice but to push hard for states to change their approach
to reading instruction. Many states, they said, wanted
to continue using failed approaches or programs with no
evidence of effectiveness.
In spring 2002, an Education Week survey found that most
state officials were generally satisfied with their existing
reading initiatives and planned to use Reading First money
to expand, enhance, or supplement them without making wholesale
changes.
Federal officials, however, said
that simply tweaking existing approaches would not satisfy
the rigorous demands of the new program. ("Federal Program Will Test States'
Reading Policies," June 19, 2002.)
“In my view, Reading First is starting to get results,
not in spite of the aggressive approach of the department,
but because of it,” said Michael J. Petrilli, a former
official at the Education Department during the current
administration. Mr. Petrilli, now the vice president for
national programs and policy at the Washington-based Thomas
B. Fordham Foundation, said the inspector general’s
report does not point to any illegal activity but chronicles
how department employees pressed to ensure the law’s
intent was followed.
The inspector general, however,
suggests that officials went beyond the law, which prohibits
federal employees from influencing or directing states’ decisions
on curricula, tests, or instructional methods.
Some observers agree
“The issue is that here are these folks who saw
an opportunity to really, fundamentally move the debate
on reading instruction,” said Andrew J. Rotherham,
a co-founder and the director of the Washington-based think
tank Education Sector. “That doesn’t allow
them to deviate from what the law allows.”
The inspector general’s office
is conducting five other audits related to Reading First.
The reports could be completed by the end of the year,
according to Mary Mitchelson, who serves as counsel to
the inspector general.
In a statement, Secretary of Education
Margaret Spellings said some of the actions described
in the report “reflect
individual mistakes” by federal employees. She added
that she was “moving swiftly to enact all of the
inspector general’s recommendations.”
The inspector general has recommended that the department
review the structure and management of the Reading First
office, establish guidelines to ensure staff members understand
the prohibitions in the NCLB law, and set up greater oversight
of programs as they are implemented.
Spellings’ Involvement
Mr. Petrilli, Mr. Rotherham, and
others question Ms. Spellings’ claims
that the program was implemented without her input. Although
she became education secretary in early 2005, after many
of the practices outlined in the report occurred, she was
closely involved in the establishment of the No Child Left
Behind program overall, and Reading First, while she served
at the White House as President Bush’s chief domestic-policy
aide during his first term, Mr. Petrilli said.
“Margaret Spellings was involved in this from day
one in her role as domestic-policy adviser, and that’s
something she should have been proud of because it’s
one of the most successful education programs in the history
of the department,” he said.
“Instead of defending it and hailing its success,
she’s hanging one of her most loyal lieutenants out
to dry,” Mr. Petrilli said, referring to Mr. Doherty.
Ms. Spellings has not yet responded to those allegations.
State and local education officials have generally praised
the program for focusing needed resources on professional
development and materials in reading. And many are reporting
that those efforts are having a positive bearing on student
achievement. But those successes have not been linked to
the curriculum and assessment decisions made by those states.
It is also not known whether a greater choice of instructional
program, combined with the additional resources for teacher
professional development and support services provided
to Reading First schools, would have had a similar outcome.
The program’s results do
not appease some officials who say the process may have
hindered their ability to serve more children.
“The process we had to go through was so excruciating,” said
Lisa Y. Gross, a spokeswoman for the Kentucky education
department. Kentucky had to revise its Reading First application
at least three times, and officials said they gained approval
only after buckling to Mr. Doherty’s demands to change
the assessment portion of the plan. Despite the benefits
of the program, Ms. Gross said, “still we believe
if we had gotten our first proposal accepted, we could
have provided many more services for students or at least
gotten started a lot sooner.”
On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, Rep.
George Miller, D-Calif., urged Republican members of
the House Education and the Workforce Committee to hold
hearings on the inspector general’s
findings.
“This was a concerted effort to corrupt the process
on behalf of partisan supporters, and taxpayers and schoolchildren
are the ones who got harmed by it,” Rep. Miller,
the committee’s ranking Democrat, said in a statement.
He was among a bipartisan group that initiated a separate
investigation of the program by the Government Accountability
Office. That report is due out in January
Sen. Richard G. Lugar, R-Ind.,
responded to the report in a letter to Ms. Spellings
this month. The report “seemed
to suggest that the department mismanagement was even worse
than expected,” he wrote. But, the senator added,
that her promise to implement the inspector general’s
recommendations was “a good start.”
—Education
Week, Vol. 26,
Issue 06, Pages 1, 24-25
PDF copy of the Inspector General's
report:
http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oig/aireports/i13f0017.pdf. |
