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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.
Reading
for Profit
Chronicle
of Higher Education, Feb. 2, 2007
By David
Glenn
When President Bush signed
the No Child Left Behind Act in January 2002, Robert
E. Slavin, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins University's
Center for Social Organization of Schools, quietly cheered.
During two decades of work at Johns
Hopkins, Mr. Slavin and his colleagues had developed
a comprehensive school-reform model known as Success
for All. He believed that the program offered powerfully
effective techniques—including
explicit phonics instruction—to reach young children
from low-income families.
A number of experiments by outside
evaluators seemed to back up Mr. Slavin's assertions.
And as No Child Left Behind worked its way through Congress
in 2001, colleagues and policy experts repeatedly told
him that Success for All would be a perfect match for
one of the new law's keystone programs: Reading First,
a $900-million-a-year project that offers states grants
to improve reading instruction for children in kindergarten
through third grade.
After all, the new law required
states to spend the federal money only on products that
were grounded in "scientifically
based reading research." Mr. Slavin's model had as
strong a scientific pedigree as any program in the country,
and it was already used in approximately 1,500 schools.
With the advent of Reading First,
Mr. Slavin hoped to add another 200 schools, and perhaps
even more. Even before the law was signed, the Success
for All Foundation, a nonprofit organization of which
he is chairman, took on extra staff and rented new office
space.
But when Reading First actually
got under way, Success for All was almost entirely shut
out. Fewer than 5 percent of Reading First schools use
Success for All —and
most of those had used it even before Reading First began.
Worse, some schools that had long used the method have
abandoned it because, Mr. Slavin says, state officials
and federal consultants have urged them to conform to the
typical practices of Reading First schools. Instead, most
states spent their grants on commercial textbooks and other
products that Mr. Slavin regards as unproved, at best.
He worries about what Diane McGuinness, an emeritus professor
of psychology at the University of South Florida, has called "junk
phonics" —that is, textbooks that take on the
trappings of phonics instruction but do not actually present
it effectively.
After the expected contracts failed
to materialize, the foundation was forced to lay off
more than half of its staff. Downstairs from Mr. Slavin's
office lies a large suite of empty cubicles.
Frustration spurred Mr. Slavin
and his colleagues to action. In early 2004, they began
to make phone calls, trying to learn why they had been
excluded. Later that year, they filed a formal complaint
with the U.S. Department of Education.
That complaint has snowballed in
a way that even Mr. Slavin might not have imagined. Reading
First is now awash in allegations of mismanagement and
conflicts of interest. Last September the Education Department's
inspector general issued a report that declared that
the program's managers had violated a long list of rules
and procedures. In February the Government Accountability
Office is expected to weigh in with a report of its own.
And Rep. George Miller, Democrat of California, the new
chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor,
plans to hold hearings soon on Reading First, a program
he championed in 2001.
"The law laid out specific guidelines that the Department
of Education chose to ignore or to interpret in such a
way as to serve its own agenda," Representative Miller
said in an e-mail message to The Chronicle.
Some of the most serious allegations
of malfeasance, all of which remain in dispute, center
on a close-knit group
of educational psychologists at the University of Oregon.
Three of those scholars have been
accused of personally profiting from their roles as federal
contractors who offered technical advice to state governments
about how to design their Reading First programs. In
many cases, those states purchased textbooks or other
materials designed or written by the Oregon scholars
themselves. Those purchases are now generating tens of
thousands of dollars in annual royalty income.
But the Reading First controversy
has much higher stakes than professional pique or profit.
Representative Miller's hearings may become a staging
ground for a grand battle between proponents and opponents
of the entire No Child Left Behind law. The central question
is whether the federal government can ˜ or should ˜ use
its leverage to promote scientifically grounded classroom
instruction.
Mr. Slavin demands that the government
clean up its act before attempting any new such programs.
But other scholars insist that Reading First is highly
effective, and they fear that it will be destroyed because
of misplaced anger over a few procedural violations.
The complaints raised by Mr. Slavin and his allies, they
say, have been tendentious and contradictory.
"I worry that Reading First is going to be a political
casualty," says Roland H. Good III, an associate professor
of school psychology at Oregon whom Mr. Slavin has accused
of conflicts of interest. "Five years ago, if you'd
told me that there was going to be an initiative implemented
on this scale, and that it was going to have this kind
of impact, I would have told you that there's no way that
that is going to happen. I have been astounded at what
has been accomplished."
Dashed Hopes
The federal government had gathered
interesting data about effective classroom instruction
since at least 1965, but in Mr. Slavin's view it had
generally let that advice sit on a shelf. He believed
that in Reading First, Congress had finally devised a
mechanism that would encourage local school districts
to choose effective programs.
Just weeks before the No Child
Left Behind law was completed, a significant change was
made in the statutory language that established Reading
First. In early drafts, states would have been required
to spend their grants only on programs with "strong evidence of effectiveness," based
on randomized experiments published in peer-reviewed journals.
But toward the end of the process, lawmakers became concerned
that such a standard would restrict states to a very few
programs, according to Robert Sweet, a former Republican
Congressional staff member. Mr. Sweet, who is now president
of the National Right to Read Foundation, a pro-phonics
organization, says that only two programs seemed to qualify:
Success for All and Direct Instruction, a nonprofit school-reform
model that was developed almost 40 years ago.
Such a narrow menu would have seemed
too much like a federal curricular diktat, Mr. Sweet
says, so the bill was softened. States were required
to spend their grants only on products "in
alignment with" the five elements of effective reading
instruction that were identified in a major report issued
in 2000 by a federally sponsored committee known as the
National Reading Panel.
That change did not bother Mr.
Slavin. Indeed, he says that it would have been absurd
to expect Success for All and Direct Instruction to expand
quickly enough to serve all 5,500 schools targeted by
the program. Of course, he says, states would inevitably
spend a large fraction of their Reading First grants
on certain commercial textbooks that had recently beefed
up their phonics content. But he did expect the federal
government to energetically remind states that Success
for All and Direct Instruction had (at least at that
moment) stronger evidence of effectiveness than those
recently revised textbooks.
That did not happen. At the "Reading First Academies" ˜ federally
financed conferences that introduced the program to state
officials in 2002 ˜ Success for All and Direct Instruction
went essentially unmentioned.
That silence seemed especially
peculiar to Mr. Slavin because several of the speakers
at the Reading First Academies were past or present faculty
members at Oregon who had begun their careers immersed
in the culture of Direct Instruction. (Direct Instruction
was developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
in the mid-1960s, but its creators decamped for Eugene
in 1970.) Why, he wondered, did they not tout the virtues
of a nonprofit program they obviously knew well? Could
it be because some of them had relationships as authors
or consultants with for-profit publishers?
The presiding spirit at Oregon
is the famously blunt scholar Siegfried E. Engelmann,
who was one of Direct Instruction's two primary creators.
Mr. Engelmann has retired from his position as a professor
of education but continues to work as a consultant for
Direct Instruction schools. He shares Mr. Slavin's annoyance
that their nonprofit programs have failed to thrive under
Reading First. "When Slavin
filed his complaint," Mr. Engelmann says, "he
had a point. Neither Success for All nor Direct Instruction
benefited from the program. The point was not just to benefit
commercial programs but to use programs with evidence of
effectiveness."
But he adds that Mr. Slavin might
be too pessimistic about the quality of commercial textbooks,
which were "absolutely
pathetic in the mid-1990s, but some of them are pretty
decent programs now."
A Hint of Trouble
Mr. Slavin points to the first
state application approved under the Reading First program
as an early, vivid hint of trouble. In late 2002, Michigan's
application was endorsed with the proviso that its districts
choose from among the materials of five commercial programs
that the state determined to be in alignment with the
five elements. Success for All and Direct Instruction
were not included on the list.
"There it was," he says. "Five basal textbooks.
And their best friends wouldn't say that any of them, with
the exception of Open Court [a series published by McGraw-Hill],
had anything like evidence of effectiveness at that time.
And yet there was Michigan saying that these were the five
programs that you have to use, and no others."
Three thousand miles away, scholars
in Eugene were hard at work getting Reading First off
the ground. Because the Education Department had hired
just two staff members to direct the program from Washington,
almost every element of its administration has been outsourced
to various entities.
Several University of Oregon scholars
accepted contracts to act as advisers to states that
were struggling to draft their Reading First grants.
At least seven Oregonians also took roles on committees
that were charged with reviewing various textbooks and
other products for alignment with the five elements.
(In 2004, after the states' grants
had been set in stone, Oregon won a contract to house
one of three major technical-assistance centers for Reading
First. The others are located at Florida State University
and the University of Texas at Austin.)
Among the early Oregon efforts
was a committee that later attracted the attention of
Mr. Slavin and investigative reporters for the newsletter
Title I Monitor. In the summer of 2002, the Education
Department was eager to make an official statement about
which assessment tools ˜ that
is, the tests used to monitor students' week-by-week progress ˜ were
scientifically valid and in alignment with the five elements.
In a collaboration with the National
Institute for Literacy, a federal office, the department
financed an "assessment
review committee" that was composed of eight scholars,
four of whom were on Oregon's faculty. That committee wound
up endorsing, among other products, the Dynamic Indicators
of Basic Early Literacy Skills, or Dibels ˜ a product
developed by Mr. Good and his colleague Ruth A. Kaminski.
Reading First has been a great
windfall for Dibels, whose materials are published by
Sopris West, a company based in Longmont, Colo. Thus
far, Dibels has been adopted by at least 35 states' Reading
First programs, producing hundreds of thousands of dollars
in royalty income.
Back-Scratch
or Best Practice?
Mr. Good himself was one of the
eight scholars on the assessment-review committee. He
says, and others confirm, that he recused himself from
evaluating his own product. But critics say that the
committee was generally a back-scratching session.
"I think these conflicts are going to bring Reading
First down," says Kenneth S. Goodman, an emeritus
professor of education at the University of Arizona and
a past president of the International Reading Association,
a professional organization for reading teachers. "And
the Dibels committee is the most glaring example." (Mr.
Goodman, it is worth noting, is skeptical of the entire
phonics-based turn in reading instruction. He and Mr. Slavin
do not often find themselves on the same side of an argument.)
The committee was marred by several
instances of procedural oddness. First, its report was
publicly released without having been vetted by the National
Institute for Literacy. And, according to the September
report issued by the Education Department's inspector
general, the original director of Reading First, Christopher
J. Doherty, and two Oregon scholars exchanged e-mail
messages in which they discussed the possibility of being
deceptive about the committee's federal financing.
But even if Washington bureaucrats
played odd games with the committee's work, that does
not necessarily invalidate the committee's conclusions.
In his office in Eugene, Mr. Good
speaks passionately in defense of his work. He has already
been interviewed at length by representatives of the
inspector general, and some of his answers have a well-rehearsed
quality.
As a school psychologist in Pennsylvania
in the early 1980s, Mr. Good says, "I practiced in the best way
that I could with the training that I had, but I felt very ˜ well,
there was a tension in that. I felt like I was working
as hard as I could to make a positive difference in children's
lives. But I didn't think I was making enough difference."
Then he discovered the emerging
technique known as "curriculum-based
measurement," which was developed by scholars at the
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Curriculum-based measurement
encourages teachers to evaluate how children in special-education
programs are progressing on specific skills that are tied
to the ordinary classroom curriculum. (Previously, school
psychologists had primarily given broad, IQ-style tests
that were not so linked to what went on in school.)
Mr. Good says Dibels is an extension
of the curriculum-based-measurement concept. With his
tool, teachers can do weekly assessments of children's
progress in phonemic awareness and oral reading fluency.
One advantage of Dibels, if it is used properly, is that
it presents children with texts that they have not seen
before, so there is little danger of teaching to the
test. The test is designed as a sort of weekly progress
report, not as a high-stakes measure that should affect
students' grades or teachers' salaries, Mr. Good says.
Mr. Good also touts Dibels's efficiency.
The assessment can be administered in less than two minutes,
and teachers can record and graph the scores with a hand-held
digital device. "We don't want teachers to feel as if they're
spending all of their time testing," he says, "and
no time actually teaching."
Mr. Good says he does not believe
his role on the assessment-review committee involved
a serious conflict of interest, for three reasons: He
recused himself from evaluating his own product; Dibels
is available in a free online version, so it isn't a
purely commercial product; and he and Ms. Kaminski had
already agreed to donate all of their royalty income
through 2005 to a research fund administered by the University
of Oregon Foundation. (Despite relinquishing those royalties,
Mr. Good concedes that he earns a substantial income
giving seminars to states and local districts about how
to use Dibels.)
Blowing the
Whistle
In early 2004, Mr. Slavin abandoned
his hopes that Success for All would be broadly included
in Reading First.
He and his colleagues began their
own investigation, filing open-records requests and working
the telephone. Mr. Slavin fixed his gaze on what he saw
as evidence of his model's exclusion, including a PowerPoint
presentation given at federally sponsored conferences
in 2002 by Marcy L. Stein, a professor of education at
the University of Washington at Tacoma.
The presentation was designed to
teach state officials how to choose a core instructional
program for Reading First. While it included examples
taken from at least three commercial textbooks, the presentation
never mentioned Success for All or Direct Instruction.
Ms. Stein responds that she had
no intention of plumping for any commercial products.
She says that she would gladly have used examples from
Success for All if she had had any at hand, and adds
that she would never consciously slight Direct Instruction,
with whose creators she has often collaborated. (She
earned her master's degree at Oregon.)
The point of her presentation,
Ms. Stein says, was to teach state officials how to use "A Consumer's Guide
to Evaluating a Core Reading Program, Grades K-3: A Critical
Elements Analysis," a document posted on Oregon's
Web site in early 2003. The "Consumer's Guide" explains,
in 58 pages of elaborate detail, how to tell if a particular
textbook is in alignment with the five elements required
under Reading First. For example, in the realm of "phonemic
awareness," does the textbook focus on "segmentation
or the combination of blending or segmenting for greatest
transfer"?
Ms. Stein says that she originally
drafted her presentation with no examples, but discovered
that it seemed impossible to explain the "Consumer's Guide's" arcane formulations ˜ especially
to state officials who often had little or no experience
with phonics ˜ without showing examples of actual
textbook pages. So, after vetting the idea with the department's
lawyers, she added a few samples of real-world textbooks.
Mr. Slavin says he accepts that
Ms. Stein's intentions were benign, but he also suggests
that she and others were kidding themselves if they believed
that many state officials were actually going to check
to see if various products met the "Consumer's Guide's" long
list of specifications.
The audiences listening to Ms.
Stein's presentations, he says, were really just desperately
hoping to hear the bottom line: Which products do we
need to include in our application to get our state grant
approved? And in that context, the fact that Ms. Stein
favorably mentioned three commercial textbooks carried
enormous weight.
"The original state proposals were almost all turned
down in the first round," Mr. Slavin says. "And
some of them were turned down multiple times. Rhode Island
was rejected six or seven times, depending on how you count
... When you're the grant writer for a $30-million proposal
to get money for K-3 for your state, it's very embarrassing
to be rejected."
'Look at the Oregon Web Site'
Mr. Slavin concedes that in certain
instances, those state applications may have been rejected
for good reason, perhaps because they proposed to use "whole language" programs
or other products that clearly lacked the five elements
prescribed in the law. In any case, after states were rejected,
they would almost always call Mr. Doherty, then the director
of Reading First, and ask what they should do differently
when they revised their applications.
And those conversations often had
a Marx Brothers quality, according to Mr. Slavin's accounts
and the inspector general's September report. If, say,
a state had proposed to use a program that obviously
fell outside Reading First's statutory requirements,
Mr. Doherty would not say so clearly, for fear of violating
the law that forbids federal officials from dictating
state and local curricula. Instead, he would give vague
suggestions like "Look at the Oregon Web
site" or "Look at the Michigan list."
State officials gradually learned
through trial and error, Mr. Slavin says, that their
applications would be approved if they proposed to use
any or all of five particular commercial textbooks as
their core instructional material. And insofar as that
trial-and-error process involved "looking
at the Oregon Web site," Mr. Slavin believes that
there was at least one serious conflict of interest in
play.
The Web site featured a list of
core instructional products that a committee of Oregon
scholars deemed to be in alignment with the five elements,
according to a formal analysis of the "Consumer's Guide." (Here, in other words,
was the "bottom line" that Mr. Slavin believes
state officials were searching for.) Among the products
on the list was a textbook series published by Pearson
Scott Foresman, which is one of the five commercial series
that have been widely purchased under Reading First.
In 2003, Pearson Scott Foresman
hired as authors of the next edition of its textbook
series two of the Oregon scholars who created the list:
Edward J. Kame'enui (who is now on a two-year leave as
commissioner of special-education research at the U.S.
Department of Education) and Deborah C. Simmons (who
has subsequently moved to Texas A&M University
at College Station). Mr.
Kame'enui and Ms. Simmons had already written a supplemental
product for Pearson Scott Foresman.
When Mr. Kame'enui took up his
government post in 2005, he filed a conflict-of-interest
disclosure that indicated that he earned between $100,000
and $150,000 annually in royalties from that earlier
product.
Shortly thereafter, the Oregon
list was altered so that Success for All was moved from
the fifth position to the seventh, and Pearson Scott
Foresman was moved from seventh to fifth.
In an e-mail message to The
Chronicle,
Ms. Simmons says that the list was altered after the
committee removed the "vocabulary" and "comprehension" elements
from its analysis of the products. That was done, she said,
because the 2000 National Reading Panel did not establish
definitive ways to teach vocabulary and comprehension.
Mr. Slavin says that he finds that
explanation "ridiculous.
Imagine Henry Ford sitting on a government panel to evaluate
cars, and saying, well, let's remove the ratings for safety
and repair records. Oh, gosh, removing those ratings turns
out to hurt Toyota's ranking and help Ford's. What a surprise."
In any case, various records on
Oregon's Web site back up Ms. Simmons's account. In 2003
the scholars removed vocabulary and comprehension from
their product analyses ˜ and
they did so consistently, not just on the "core program" list
where Success for All's ranking suffered.
More than any of Mr. Slavin's other
accusations, this one inspires eye rolling among his
targets. Whether in fifth position or seventh, they say,
Success for All was prominently featured on the Oregon
list ˜ so the
list seems to be an unlikely villain in Mr. Slavin's tale.
Some other factor must explain Success for All's failure
to thrive in Reading First. And isn't Pearson Scott Foresman's
hiring of Mr. Kame'enui and Ms. Simmons ˜ two scholars
with long track records in reading research ˜ exactly
the sort of thing that Reading First was designed to encourage?
The new textbooks might not have Success for All's high
evidence of effectiveness, they say, but with careful studies
it should be clear in five or 10 years whether they are
reasonable substitutes for Success for All and Direct Instruction.
"Textbook publishers have told us for a long time
that if we want to include more scientifically based material,
we'll have to change the market and create a demand for
that material," says Ms. Stein. "Reading First
has allowed us to change the market."
Mr. Slavin agrees that Pearson
Scott Foresman's hiring of Mr. Kame'enui and Ms. Simmons
is welcome, but he says that they should immediately
have recused themselves from any role in advising states
that were still in the process of building their Reading
First packages. "If they'd
been government employees, this could never have happened," he
says. "But because they were government contractors,
they somehow felt that these things didn't apply to them."
Ms. Simmons, however, strongly
denies any wrongdoing. "I
maintained an objective, unbiased, and uncompromising role
whenever I assisted states in developing a review process," she
says.
Baby and Bathwater
What does all of this portend for
the future of Reading First ˜ and for scientifically
based education reform more generally? The inspector
general's report recommended a number of narrow procedural
reforms, most of which the department says it has embraced.
Among other things, the Washington staff has expanded
from two to seven.
Mr. Slavin says that, despite everything
he despises about the program, he expects that it will
turn out to have had some significant positive effects.
(A large-scale federally financed study of student achievement
under Reading First is expected to be released in early
2008.) "With a
billion dollars a year, and with new reading coaches in
every school, and with an average of 20 minutes more reading
instruction a day, they've almost certainly managed to
do something positive," Mr. Slavin says.
"The program has clearly been run unethically," says
Jack F. Jennings, director of the Center on Education Policy,
a nonpartisan Washington think tank that has issued two
long reports on Reading First. "They wanted to get
what they thought were the right programs in place, but
they trampled on ethics and procedures in the process."
At the same time, Mr. Jennings
says that the program has important virtues that he hopes
are not lost. "It
would be a shame to lose sight of the good effects," he
says. "It's striking to me how well the program seems
to be raising students' test scores. And principals consistently
say that they like it."
Representative Miller agrees. Reading
First "is an
important part of meeting the No Child Left Behind Act's
goals of closing the achievement gap," he says. "The
problem is with how the Department of Education has implemented
the program, not with the program itself."
One veteran of the Education Department,
meanwhile, says that he feels badly burned by the controversy,
and wonders if Reading First ought to be radically revised.
Michael J. Petrilli, a vice president of the Thomas B.
Fordham Foundation, a Washington think tank, and a former
official in the department's Office of Innovation and
Improvement, says that the inspector general's September
report "was
an incredibly unfair depiction" and "completely
missed the policy context."
A muddy fight was almost inevitable,
Mr. Petrilli says, because "Congress was talking out of both sides of
its mouth. At the same time that it was telling the department
not to fund nonscientific programs, Congress was highly
squeamish about the department appearing to dictate local
curriculum."
"From the evidence that I can see," Mr. Petrilli
continues, "that prescriptive approach has worked
very well at improving students' learning. On the other
hand, all of the political blowback that we've seen suggests
to me that this kind of effort is just not sustainable.
We might be better off if the federal government just stepped
back and focused on clarifying the results that schools
are supposed to achieve in terms of student learning, and
then allowed those schools to pursue those targets with
whatever techniques they deem best."
Reading First has had one important
unappreciated virtue, says Ms. Stein. Although Success
for All and Direct Instruction have been largely excluded ˜ an exclusion that Ms.
Stein says is regrettable ˜ their spirits have been
incorporated throughout the program. Participating schools
are required to intensively coach their teachers and to
monitor their students' progress each week, and in each
case, the techniques have been pilfered to a large extent
from Success for All and Direct Instruction. "Every
successful school reform model has had those elements," Ms.
Stein says. "We were able to incorporate those essential
components throughout Reading First."
Mr. Slavin, for his part, hopes
that the program is structured very differently if it
is renewed. "Common sense will
tell you," he says, "that it was absurd to subcontract
this entire billion-dollar program to universities, with
only two people on staff in Washington to monitor the work.
That was bound to fail."
THE 5 ELEMENTS
The No Child Left Behind Act, which
established the Reading First program, names five essential
elements of reading instruction and includes an elaborate
definition of "reading" itself.
The five essential components of
explicit and systematic instruction in reading: 1. phonemic
awareness 2. phonics 3. vocabulary development 4. reading
fluency, including oral reading skills 5. reading-comprehension
strategies
The term "reading" means
a complex system of deriving meaning from print that
requires all of the following: 1. The skills and knowledge
to understand how phonemes, or speech sounds, are connected
to print 2. The ability to decode unfamiliar words 3.
The ability to read fluently 4. Sufficient background
information and vocabulary to foster reading comprehension
5. The development of appropriate active strategies to
construct meaning from print 6. The development and maintenance
of a motivation to read
PDF
copy of the Inspector General's report:
http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oig/aireports/i13f0017.pdf. |
