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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.
E-Mails
Reveal Federal Reach Over Reading
Education
Week, Feb. 20, 2007
By Kathleen
Kennedy Manzo
Communications show pattern of meddling in Reading First
The Reading First initiatives rigorous requirements have
earned it a reputation as the most prescriptive federal
grant program in education. Now, an Education Week review
of hundreds of e-mail exchanges details a pattern of federal
interference that skirted legal prohibitions.
In the midst of carrying out the $1 billion-a-year program,
which is part of the No Child Left Behind Act, federal
officials:
- Worked to undermine the literacy
plan of the nation's largest school system;
- Pressured several states to reject
certain reading programs and assessments that were initially
approved under their Reading First plans;
- Rallied influential politicians,
political advisers, and appointees to ensure that state
schools chiefs stayed on track with program mandates;
- Pressed one state superintendent
to withdraw grant funding from a district that demoted
a principal in a participating school.
In regular e-mail discussions,
Christopher J. Doherty, the Reading First director at
the U.S. Department of Education until last September,
and G. Reid Lyon, a branch chief at the National Institute
of Child Health and Human Development until June 2005
and an influential adviser to the initiative, closely
monitored states‚ progress
in applying for Reading First money, in issuing subgrants
to districts, and in complying with the law's provisions
for scientifically based instruction. They also worked
out strategies for intervening where they deemed more
federal control was warranted.
“We ding people all the time in Reading First,” Mr.
Doherty wrote in March 2005, after he pressured Illinois
education leaders to pull funding from a district. "We
don't like to do it, of course, but we do it because otherwise
RF turns to crap and means nothing, just another funding
stream to do whatever it is you were going to do anyway."
Some former federal officials and supporters of the program
argue that such oversight was essential to its success,
but a number of state and local officials took offense
and questioned whether Reading First staff members exceeded
their authority. Some policy experts say they came close
to doing so.
"That's an unprecedented level of interference," said
Christopher T. Cross, a policy consultant for Cross & Joftus
LLC in Danville, Calif. Mr. Cross helped write the ban
against federal intervention in curriculum and instruction
into the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in the
1970s and later served as an assistant secretary in the
Education Department under President George H.W. Bush.
The language
was left in when the law was reauthorized as the No Child
Left Behind Act in 2001. It states that federal employees
are prohibited from exercising "any
direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum,
program of instruction, administration, or personnel of
any educational institution, school, or school system."
"The intention when that language was put into the
statute," Mr. Cross said, "was that these were
decisions that had to be made at the local level in connection
with local standards. I think there's no question what
went on [in Reading First] is right on the border of crossing
the line on that provision."
Showdown in Rockford
A highly critical
report issued by the Education Department's inspector
general last fall concluded that federal officials may
have overstepped their authority in crafting the strict
requirements. Inspector General John P. Higgins Jr. also
said those officials seemed to favor a particular instructional
method while discrediting others. ("Scathing Report
Casts Cloud Over Reading First‚" <http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2006/10/04/06read.h26.html> Oct.
4, 2006.)
The crass
and sometimes vulgar e-mail exchanges that underpinned
the inspector general's findings stunned many educators
and policymakers. The findings led to a shakeup in the
department‚s Reading
First office.
But advocates of the program, and allies of Mr. Doherty,
protested that the report was overblown and had unfairly
selected sensational e-mails to paint a dedicated and effective
employee as a rogue operator within the department. The
e-mail record, however, shows Mr. Doherty's aggressive
and arrogant tone repeated in messages to Mr. Lyon and
other colleagues.
The e-mails were obtained by Education
Week and a complainant in a case against the Department
of Education through the Freedom of Information Act.
Some state and local officials said they
felt bullied by Mr. Doherty. One such case played out in
Rockford, Ill., in early 2005, after federal officials
received e-mail messages about a principal at a Reading
First school there. The principal was reassigned after
battling with district officials over reading instruction
at Lewis Lemon Elementary School. The new superintendent,
Dennis Thompson, and district director of instruction Martha
Hayes wanted the school to supplement its direct-instruction
model with more varied reading selections and writing activities
after determining that students weren‚t being prepared for the more
rigorous coursework of the later grades.
The principal received help from a local supporter of
the National Right to Read Foundation, which promotes phonics
instruction. Robert W. Sweet Jr., then an influential senior
analyst with the education committee of the U.S. House
of Representatives and the founder of the NRRF, asked Mr.
Lyon to look into the matter. Mr. Lyon corresponded with
Mr. Doherty, a direct-instruction advocate, about the need
to apply pressure to state leaders in Illinois.
In March of
2005, after numerous telephone discussions and a meeting
with state schools Superintendent Randy Dunn, Mr. Doherty
sent a letter to the state, expressing his dissatisfaction
with Illinois‚ implementation of
the grant. Mr. Doherty cited the Rockford case and the
state‚s hiring of an employee for the Reading First
program who he thought did not subscribe to scientifically
based reading research. He informed Mr. Dunn that the state
was being „designated in need of corrective action,‰ and
would be subject to additional monitoring, consequently
risking the loss of millions of dollars in future grant
funding.
"Clearly, there were issues of program
compliance in Rockford, and we were working to address
them," said
Mr. Dunn, the state schools chief until last month. "But
the situation with the principal there had given a great
entree to the feds to start wielding a heavy hand. They
took an opportunity with a situation that was kind of separate
from the Reading First program to get ahold of us, the
state, directly by the throat."
Mr. Thompson,
the district chief, said the issue was a personnel matter,
unrelated to Reading First. He said he wasn‚t even
aware that federal officials were involved and kept apprised
of the situation in Rockford until informed by Education
Week.
Mr. Doherty
and Mr. Lyon e-mailed each other repeatedly about the
situation, sometimes in response to Mr. Sweet's
queries. They expressed outrage at what appeared to them
to be mistreatment of the principal and district officials‚ undermining
of the direct-instruction program with "their ill-fated
wrong turn to balanced literacy."
Although "balanced literacy" is viewed by many
educators as an approach incorporating a variety of skills-
and literature-based reading methods, it is considered
code for "whole language" by Mr. Doherty and
others pushing more explicit and systematic instruction.
The field
of reading instruction has been marked for decades by
disputes over the best approach to teaching reading—generally
speaking, a phonics-based vs. a literature-based approach.
Over the past decade, a consensus has emerged that a combination
of approaches is best, although there is still considerable
debate over how much skills instruction is needed.
In response
to Mr. Doherty's demands, Illinois tried to send a monitoring
team to investigate Rockford‚s
Reading First program. Mr. Thompson refused to cooperate
with the state officials and federal consultants who visited,
saying the short notice would have disrupted schools‚ operations.
Mr. Doherty then directed the state to freeze the district‚s
funding, and ultimately to withdraw the grant. Those actions
prompted another e-mail from Mr. Lyon: "wow—Talk
about a guy with smarts, integrity AND balls," he
wrote. "I am talking about you Chris."
The principal at Lewis Lemon Elementary sued the district.
District officials said a settlement was reached in the
case, but could not discuss the details.
"They made all these judgments about us when they
knew absolutely nothing about what we were doing," said
Mr. Thompson, who added that he was perplexed how the revisions
to the reading plan could be perceived as whole language. "We
ended up getting into a war of labels."
Mr. Doherty
would not comment for this story. Sandi Jacobs, who helped
administer Reading First as a senior program specialist
with the Education Department, said she and Mr. Doherty
believed that the Rockford district was "severely
and significantly out of compliance." They then pressed
state officials to deal with the matter.
New York Story
In New York City, federal officials jumped into the fray
over reading instruction months before the state even applied
for Reading First money. When city Schools Chancellor Joel
I. Klein unveiled his plans for a districtwide literacy
framework in January 2003, his action drew criticism from
a number of reading experts, who argued that a highly structured,
phonics-based program would serve students better than
the literature- and writing-based plan.
Rod Paige,
the U.S. secretary of education at the time, asked Mr.
Lyon to help city officials in understanding the research
on effective instruction, according to an account of
the events Mr. Lyon sent in an e-mail to a prominent
reading researcher. A group of researchers associated
with the NICHD, Mr. Lyon's agency, then wrote a letter
to Mr. Klein detailing why they believed his "balanced literacy" program
was not sufficiently research-based. The researchers subsequently
met with Deputy Chancellor Diana Lam and other district
officials to discuss their evaluation.
"New York City was a big concern, and legitimately
so," Mr. Lyon said in an interview this month. "If
you put in place a new program that changes the rules,
and you have a city like New York get the money and flout
the rules, then everyone else would want to do the same
thing."
After district
officials added a stronger phonics text, one of the researchers
involved in the review told Education Week she considered
it a sound instructional approach. ("N.Y.C. Hangs Tough Over Maverick Curriculum," <http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2003/10/15/07nyccurric.h23.html> Oct.
15, 2003.)
Balanced Literacy Rebuffed
But later in 2003, as New York state was negotiating with
federal officials over its final Reading First plan, federal
officials and consultants took another stab at persuading
city officials to take a different tack on reading instruction.
In the interview,
Mr. Lyon said state officials requested guidance on how
New York City could meet Reading First criteria. Sally
Shaywitz, a Yale University professor and a member of
the National Reading Panel˜a congressionally
mandated committee that issued an influential 2000 report
on reading research˜and two other researchers conducted
the review.
Mr. Lyon helped
arrange for those researchers to meet with Chancellor
Klein to outline their findings and discuss how the city‚s
schools could benefit from a commercial core program
for reading, instead of the customized framework the
city had crafted.
A federal contractor for Reading First oversaw the review
and recommended that a task force, consisting of Ms. Shaywitz
and other key researchers, be appointed to help the district
choose an appropriate program.
Mr. Lyon regularly
checked in with Mr. Doherty of Reading First to ask, "Can you brief me on the status of the
NYC RF application as I am getting Qs from higher." The
request continued: "Did they do the right thing?" Later,
Mr. Lyon indicated that there was "WH interest."
The former
NICHD branch chief, who managed the $120 million grant
program for reading research at the National Institutes
of Health in Bethesda, Md., asked another researcher,
an author of the Open Court commercial reading curriculum,
to help him make the case for a structured, comprehensive
core program. Mr. Lyon said he sought advice from the
researcher, Marilyn Adams, because of her long-standing
reputation in reading research. He did not consider her
link to Open Court a conflict of interest because her
commitment was to the research first. "I need good data fast," Mr.
Lyon wrote to Ms. Adams in August 2003, after describing
Mr. Klein's reluctance to adopt "an evidence based
program like Open Court" because of the mixed results
of the program in other big cities, and the alternative
approaches being used in Boston and San Diego. "I
think he will listen if we can show gains from evidence
based programs."
Mr. Lyon also
acknowledges in the e-mail that the text was just one
of the essential components, "teachers
and implementation being as important."
In e-mails
to Margaret Spellings, who was President Bush's chief
domestic-policy adviser before becoming education secretary,
Mr. Lyon discusses "NY City," according
to the subject line. All but one line was redacted under
an exemption in the federal freedom-of-information law
that considers pending decisions to be confidential. In
the end, Mr. Lyon asks, "Let me know if you want me
to do anything."
In sharing
the message with Mr. Doherty, Mr. Lyon commented: "Gees — this
never stops — we have to win this one."
When
the Education Department inspector general's
report was released, now-Secretary Spellings said that
the problems cited "reflected individual mistakes." But
at least one former Education Department official has suggested
that Ms. Spellings was deeply involved in the program while
working at the White House.
"She micromanaged the implementation of Reading First
from her West Wing office," Michael J. Petrilli, who
worked in the department from 2001 to 2005, under Secretary
Paige and Secretary Spellings, wrote in the National Review
Online last fall. "She was the leading cheerleader
for an aggressive approach."
Mr. Petrilli, now a vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham
Foundation, a Washington think tank, has argued that Mr.
Doherty did what officials in the White House and Congress
expected him to do.
Ms. Spellings has not responded to the allegations about
her role. The Education Department did not respond to a
request for comment last week.
New York state
was awarded it's Reading First grant in September 2003.
In the end, New York City relented and chose a commercial
reading program "Harcourt Trophies" for
its 49 Reading First schools, but stuck with the balanced-literacy
program to guide reading instruction at other schools.
The 1.1 million-student
district's
Reading First funding is considered vulnerable because
the inspector general found its grant application should
not have been approved, and recommended that the state
take back its $107 million grant.
Chancellor
Klein would not comment for this article. But in a August
2003 interview with The New York
Times, he said: "I think it's a less filling/tastes great‚ debate.
I don't believe curriculums are the key to education. I
believe teachers are."
Fingerprints Elsewhere
Many other Reading First details large and small came
to the attention of Mr. Lyon and Mr. Doherty between 2003
and 2005, which they discussed by e-mail. Mr. Lyon also
visited states to provide guidance on Reading First.
In March 2003, for example, he agreed to meet with a handful
of Indiana legislators who requested his advice on ways
to ensure that state officials adhered to Reading First
mandates. Mr. Lyon suggested the state would need extra
monitoring because of the potential for noncompliance,
which could send a message to other states of the consequences
of not adhering to the requirements. The legislators had
suggested to Mr. Lyon that state education officials in
Indiana were not ready to abandon its existing reading
approach.
After meeting
with officials in Louisiana and North Carolina, Mr. Lyon
told Mr. Doherty that they needed to discuss various
issues of concern, including the assessments and consultants
that the states were planning to use under their Reading
First grants. The two federal officials discussed Louisiana‚s
desire to use an assessment for Reading First schools that
they did not deem research-based, and Mr. Lyon suggested
to a North Carolina administrator that a textbook by a
well-known reading researcher was inappropriate for use
in Reading First training sessions.
Local educators, researchers, community leaders, or parents
alerted them to some issues.
One New Jersey
parent asked Mr. Lyon for help in July 2003, because
state officials were allowing the use of a Wright Group
reading program, owned by the McGraw-Hill Cos. She didn‚t consider the text research-based.
Mr. Lyon alerted Mr. Doherty. The Reading First director
recalled that "we forced Maine to drop the bad program." By
September 2003, nearly a year after New Jersey's grant
had been approved, New Jersey officials disallowed funding
for the text.
"As you may remember, RF got Maine to UNDO its already
made decision to have Rigby be one of their two approved
core programs (Ha, ha — Rigby as a CORE program?
When pigs fly!) We also as you may recall, got NJ to stop
its districts from using Rigby (and the Wright Group, btw)
and are doing the same in Mississippi," Mr. Doherty
wrote in October 2003. "This is for your FYI, as I
think this program-bashing is best done off or under the
major radar screens."
In May 2005, Harcourt Achieve Inc., which owns the Rigby
Literacy program, issued a press release outlining changes
it made to the program to ensure it aligned more closely
with research. The changes were prompted, the company said,
by deficiencies that were brought to light by the Reading
First grant reviews.
And when a Texas consultant informed Mr. Lyon and Mr.
Doherty of breaches in that state's Reading First program
by the interim state commissioner of education, they debated
in a series of e-mail exchanges with a researcher how best
to get state officials back in line. They discussed getting
influential advisers to the Bush administration, and federal
officials with Texas ties, to put pressure on the state
education department.
Hypervigilance Defended
By many accounts,
Mr. Doherty, a former director of a Baltimore-based organization
that oversees direct-instruction reading, was a tireless
leader for the program. Reading First, which has the
support of many educators, was intended to bring research-based
instruction to the nation‚s
underperforming schools. Mr. Doherty and Ms. Jacobs were
essentially the only staff members assigned full time to
the program.
Many state
officials rallied to his defense when the inspector general‚s
report was released last fall. Reading First recently
received the highest performance rating of all NCLB programs
from the White House Office of Management and Budget.
"It's not that Reading First was over the top," Ms.
Jacobs said. "It's much more that many programs [administered
by the Education Department] are severely undermonitored."
Sol Stern,
a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute
and an outspoken critic of New York City‚s
reading plan, also defends the hard-line approach.
"If Doherty's sin was to lean on a state education
agency or two to promote a reading program backed by science
over one that wasn't, well, that's just what the Reading
First legislation intended," Mr. Stern, wrote in the
Winter 2007 edition of City Journal, the institute's magazine.
Mr. Lyon,
who is designing a teacher-preparation program for the
Dallas-based Best Associates, said this month that the "hypervigilant monitoring" was
necessary, but that he did not anticipate how the Reading
First mandates would be complicated by the issue of local
control.
"Here you have local control, which historically
has always been there, and then you have Reading First
being very prescriptive," he said.
"In my mind, Reading First has to carry the day," he
added.
'Shameful Behavior'
Critics, other observers, and some stakeholders alike,
however, say the results do not necessarily justify the
heavy-handed management. Some vendors claim their reading
programs were not given a fair shake. The nonprofit Success
for All program, for example, has lost business under the
federal initiative, according to founder Robert E. Slavin,
despite its extensive research and documented results.
Many of the e-mail documents were obtained recently by
Mr. Slavin from the National Institutes of Health, more
than 18 months after he submitted the request.
Some of the commercial programs that have been widely
adopted by Reading First schools did not have any more
evidence of effectiveness than others that were not as
successful.
"The law said nothing about picking specific programs,
it just indicated scientifically based programs. But when
we looked at the other programs that were being approved,
we saw very little evidence that those were more scientific
than the ones we were trying to use," said Gene Wilhoit,
who as state superintendent in Kentucky sent letters of
complaint to the Education Department questioning the pressure
his agency received to reject certain reading programs
and assessments.
Mr. Wilhoit,
now the executive director of the Council of Chief State
School Officers, said, "We didn't feel
like [the federal oversight] was just an attempt to hold
onto the integrity of the program."
Susan B. Neuman,
who helped roll out the program as the Education Department‚s
assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education,
agrees. Some of the e-mails were also shared with Ms.
Neuman, and in a few of the exchanges, Mr. Doherty indicated
he was relaying Ms. Neuman's views on how the program
should be carried out.
But in one e-mail to her, Mr. Doherty suggests that she
should not be involved in the talks over state applications
and implementation. Ms. Neuman, who left the department
in January 2003, has said that she was left out of many
discussions with state officials.
"They far exceeded their mandate," she said
in an interview, referring to Mr. Doherty and other federal
officials. "We wanted to figure out ways that we could
make Reading First a more powerful intervention [than previous
federal programs], but certainly not in micromanaging school
districts."
"In the
beginning," Ms. Neuman added, "this
was an honest effort to make something better, but this
is shameful behavior."
======================================================================
E-mail Excerpts (SOURCE:
National Institutes of Health)
I am going to review
all my [Indiana] files on Monday. Having done no subgrants
yet, it may be hard to make something stick, but if they
are trying to go soft with the requirements, they are just
as good a candidate as any other state to show them/the
rest that RF is NOT just another federal reading program
that can be flouted.
—Reading First Director Christopher J. Doherty to
G. Reid Lyon, a branch chief for the National Institute
of Child Health and Human Development, citing concerns
that Indiana officials may not be taking Reading First
requirements seriously enough, March 2, 2003
Monitoring will be key as usual. They will game the system
if they can. They think they have already done everything
and are getting the RF bucks to shine shit. How strong
should I be with respect to guidance at the highest state
level. I will meet with Gov. [Kathleen] Sebelius in the
morning. How detailed should I be with respect to the shortcomings.
—Mr. Lyon to Mr. Doherty regarding Kansas‚ Reading
First program, April 16, 2003
I have been
in good, regular touch with Everett Barnes, pres. of
RMC Research Corp., which does both [Reading First Technical
Assistance] and some [Comprehensive] Center work, too
re: the Shaywitz report and I am very happy to learn
that you find it scathing and clear in its conclusions/recommendations.
Not happy that NYC is doing something this bad, of course,
just glad that the report is not the usual equivocating
'On the one hand,..but on the other‚' kind of stuff.'this
is not a dueling experts‚ kind of thing. This has
the Flat Earth Society on one side and people who own/understand
globes on the other.
—Mr. Doherty to Mr. Lyon, referring to a review of
New York City‚s literacy plan, Aug. 29, 2003
Confidentially: Well, I spoke to [a New Jersey official]
with a roomful of others on their end and they are HALTING
the funding of Rigby and, while we were at it, Wright Group.
They STOPPED the districts who wanted to use those programs.
We won in Maine, we won in New Jersey. Morale is sky high
across the country. State plans have gone from 'on average'
crap, to each one being 'at least on paper' strong and
aligned with [scientifically based reading research], and
we have lots of monitoring muscle to flex and [technical
assistance] brains to provide. Strong law, great funding,
solid, guiding science. We are winning.
—Mr. Doherty to Mr. Lyon, in reference to the rejection
of reading textbooks that they viewed as not meeting federal
requirements, Sept. 5, 2003
Just got off the phone (again) with Randy Dunn. He confirms
that [Illinois] has frozen Rockford's RF remainder of $638,633
and we are working on finalizing this together. Please,
close hold. There are/will be be consequences for Rockford's
idiocy. And kids, unfortunately, are paying for the decisions
of adults, again.
—Mr. Doherty to Mr. Lyon, Feb. 15, 2005
PDF copy of the Inspector General's
report:
http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oig/aireports/i13f0017.pdf. |
