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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.
She
Found Abuses in U.S. Plan for Reading
ON
EDUCATION, The New York Times, Nov. 15, 2006
By Joseph
Berger
SAVANNAH, Ga.—Don’t
be overly disarmed by Cindy Cupp’s Southern molasses.
“I’m
just a little old peon down here in Savannah” is
the way she describes herself and her company, which publishes
reading kits for kindergarteners and first graders.
Yes,
her business is small. Dr. Cupp, 57, and Ginger Douglass,
her older sister, are the only employees, working out of
a small warehouse on this city’s outskirts.
Their profits have never topped $200,000.
But Dr. Cupp has
proved to be a canny businesswoman; she sells her reading
kits to 80 of Georgia’s 1,267 elementary
schools. She has also emerged as something of a giant-killer.
With relentless sleuthing, she has become one of several
whistle-blowers who uncovered evidence of conflicts of
interest and favoritism in the Bush administration’s
$6 billion Reading First program.
The program, which was
intended to ensure that all lower-income children learned
to read, awarded grants to states to buy reading textbooks
and tests. It turned out to be a bonanza for certain textbook
publishers and authors. A half-dozen experts setting guidelines
for which reading textbooks and tests could be purchased
by schools were also the authors of textbooks and tests
that ended up being used.
DR. CUPP’S complaints about
the program helped propel an investigation by the inspector
general for the United States Department of Education that
has resulted in three reports condemning “a lack
of integrity and ethical values” in Reading First.
The program’s director
resigned in September. More reports are anticipated, and
Representative George Miller, the ranking Democrat on the
House Education and the Workforce Committee, likely to
become its new chairman, has called for a criminal investigation.
Dr.
Cupp is a self-described speedboat who spent 19 years teaching
children and adults to read. At her company, Cupp Publishers,
she visits Georgia schools demonstrating her reading kits,
while her sister, a retired guidance counselor, packs them
for shipping and handles the bookkeeping.
When the federal
government enacted Reading First in 2002, Dr. Cupp thought
her company would surely get a slice of the pie. After
all, 90 percent of students in the schools that use her
kits had learned to read by the end of first grade.
The
federal program emphasized phonics — mastering
the sounds of letters and letter blends — as opposed
to what officials considered the mushiness of whole-language
teaching, which emphasizes grasping meaning through good
children’s literature. Dr. Cupp’s materials
also emphasized phonics — in 60 stories centered
on two caped turtles named Jack and Jilly.
That emphasis
was on display one day recently in Marie Durrence’s
kindergarten at the East Broad Street Elementary School
here.
“Jack can see the man play,” Terrica
Williams read, pride glinting through her bashful smile.
“Jack
can see the man go, go, go,” Kiara Plummer
chimed in.
Still, schools that used her materials
found themselves frozen out of federal money. Dr. Cupp
sought an explanation from a friend at the Georgia Department
of Education, where Dr. Cupp was director of reading from
1996 to 1999, and was told, she said, that any school listing
her reading program “would not be funded.”
After
the federal department repeatedly rejected their grant
applications, Georgia officials concluded that “this
money is available if you follow the rulebook,” said
Dana Tofig, communications director for the Georgia Education
Department. Dr. Cupp’s reading program “did
not meet the benchmarks it had to meet,” he said,
adding that the officials who could explain why no longer
worked in the department.
Dr. Cupp points out that Georgia
chose big textbook publishers, like Scott Foresman and
Macmillan/McGraw-Hill, spurning what she called home-cooked
turkey dinners like her reading program. She ended up losing
contracts at about a half-dozen schools. Then, she said,
by demanding files under Georgia’s
open records law, she discovered that a national evaluator
had never even looked at her program.
Dr. Cupp’s dealings
with the Georgia Education Department are being examined
by the federal inspector general. Mary Mitchelson, counsel
for that office, said, “We don’t
talk about our pending work.” But Dr. Cupp is hoping
to get some answers.
Others might have given up when they
lost their contract, but Dr. Cupp said she has a strong
inclination to resist injustice, rooted in a childhood
shadowed by an alcoholic mother. She did not sheepishly
accept her fate because she thought she deserved a place.
“We’re
not all going to be Wal-Marts and K-Marts,” she
said. “I go to the hardware store down the street
because I can walk in and say, ‘Help me with this,’ because
I know the guy.” So she filed a complaint.
According
to Robert E. Slavin, chairman of Success for All, a nonprofit
publisher whose phonics-based program is used in 1,200
American schools and who
also complained when 200 schools dropped his program in
order to get federal money, Dr.
Cupp got the ball rolling against Reading First. She “gave
us an example and gave us some courage,” Mr.
Slavin said.
Last December, federal inspectors came
to Savannah, a city graced by sleepy squares and shaded
by oak trees dripping with Spanish moss.
Dr. Cupp showed
the investigators hundreds of documents she collected over
three years that showed links between contractors hired
by the federal government to evaluate school reading programs,
and the writers of those programs. She also diagrammed
these links. Her findings and those of others, including
reporters for Education Week, found that consultants hired
to help school districts apply for and run Reading First
grants sometimes received hefty royalties from the very
materials that schools were encouraged to buy.
For example,
Dr. Cupp learned that a writer of a Scott Foresman reading
textbook selected by schools in Georgia and other states
was Edward Kame’enui, a professor
on leave from the University of Oregon. Dr. Kame’enui
headed a Reading First technical center in Oregon, one
of three under contract that help state officials run Reading
First programs. Dr. Slavin unearthed
financial disclosure forms Dr. Kame’enui filed for 2005 and 2006 showing
that he earned between $100,000 and $250,000 a year from
Scott Foresman’s parent company, Pearson.
Dr. Kame’enui
is now commissioner of the National Center for Special
Education Research, an arm of the federal Education Department.
Chad Colby, a spokesman at the department,
said Dr. Kame’enui’s “role
at the department has nothing to do with Reading First
anymore, so he’s not giving interviews.”
Dr.
Henry L. Johnson, assistant secretary for elementary and
secondary education, contends that the universe of science-based
reading research is small and would include some textbook
writers, but Dr. Cupp argues that it is not so small that
blatant conflicts were inevitable.
“It’s like
saying there are only six heart surgeons in the United
States,” she said. Watchdogs
like the Center for Education Policy think Reading First
money has generally improved reading. Yet the center has
also has found ethical problems with the way the program
was run.
Dr. Cupp, a Republican by habit, sees
an irony in the fact that an administration supposedly
skeptical of Washington bureaucracies that dictate to local
governments ended up creating one that did precisely that.
She thinks the Reading First scandal “will go down
as the greatest flimflam in the history of education.” But
she said what drove her was the sheer injustice of evaluators
rejecting reading kits that she knew succeeded. Her life
has been teaching children to read, and “they were
attacking my life.”
“The issue is not what reading
program is good or bad but that the playing field wasn’t
level, and schools lost their right of choice,” she
said.
PDF copy of the Inspector General's
report:
http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oig/aireports/i13f0017.pdf.
Item
below is
excerpted from Scott Foresman promotional material
Ed Kame'enui
Professor
and Director, Institute for Development of Educational
Achievement, University of Oregon. Director of the
Western Regional Reading First Technical Assistance
Center. Program author of Scott Foresman Reading
Street |
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Quote
from Scott Foresman promotional material for Reading
Street
series and interview with Ed
Kame'enui:
Q: Are
there some things about Scott Foresman Reading Street
related to assessment that you're excited about?
A: Yes, I'm very
excited about Scott Foresman Reading Street because it
takes assessment and progress monitoring very seriously.
We have enough data to know that children ought to be
making progress along the way. We have data that tell
us how much progress they should be making in kindergarten,
on what skills at what points in time, and the kind of
increments they should be gaining at different points
in time. We have that information in kindergarten, first
grade, second grade, and third grade. To me, it's absolutely
a critical piece of a solid, scientifically based reading
program. |
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