ALL IN THE FAMILY:
The Bushes and
the McGraws
By Jim Trelease, © 2004,
2006
 ne of
the trademarks of the current reading reform legislation
out of Washington is that any district wishing to qualify
for government funding must be implementing "scientifically
based"
reading instruction. Only "approved" reading
series/texts/curricula will be funded by the government.
  
By the National Reading Panel's standards, that
would mean a heavily scripted phonics program. And who
is the biggest phonics publisher? McGraw-Hill, the
publisher of Open
Court. It was McGraw-Hill representatives and authors
who dominated Gov. George W. Bush's Texas reading advisory
board. No surprise that Open Court was the program of
choice in the Lone Star State. And McGraw-Hill's connections
to the National Reading Panel's report is no less transparent: Widemeyer
Communications,
the Washington PR firm that handled the promotion of Open
Court in Texas, was also the firm hired to promote the
NRP's report, including the writing of its Introduction,
Summary, and video, the three parts that have taken the
most flack from critics.
All of which would be meaningless if McGraw-Hill's and the
NRP's findings weren't being billed as "scientifically
based." Open
Court's crown jewel is its success in the Houston Independent
School District. That also has taken on some tarnish in
light of the Houston ISD's numbers scandal (see Miracles).
Stephen Metcalf, writing in The Nation ("Reading
Between the Lines," Jan. 28, 2002), is inclined to believe it's
based on the "family connections" between the
Bushes and McGraw-Hill that go back three generations,
beginning when President Bush's grandfather Prescott and
the McGraws were among the founding bluebloods of the original
Jupiter Island (FL) money circle in the 1930's. Metcalf
reports:
 he amount
of cross-pollination and mutual admiration between
the Administration and [McGraw-Hill] is striking:
Harold McGraw Jr. sits on the national
grant advisory and founding board of the Barbara
Bush Foundation for Family Literacy.
McGraw in turn received the highest literacy
award from President Bush in the early 1990s,
for his contributions to the cause of literacy.
The McGraw Foundation awarded current
Bush Education Secretary Rod Paige its
highest educator's award while Paige was
Houston's school chief; Paige, in turn, was
the keynote speaker at McGraw-Hill's "government
initiatives" conference last spring
[2001]. Harold McGraw III was selected
as a member of President George W. Bush's transition
advisory team, along with McGraw-Hill board
member Edward Rust Jr., the CEO of
State Farm and an active member of the Business
Roundtable on educational issues. An ex-chief
of staff for Barbara Bush is returning to
work for Laura Bush in the White House — after
a stint with McGraw-Hill as a media
relations executive. John Negroponte left
his position as McGraw-Hill's executive
vice president for global markets to become
Bush's ambassador to the United Nations.
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None of
the above is to suggest that hiring your friends is inherently
evil or criminal. Many successful business leaders do
legitimate business with their friends (one of the reasons
God put golf courses on this earth), while governors
and presidents have long hired their friends and colleagues
as cabinet members and advisors.
Thus the phonics report became
part of the full report of the NRP uncorrected, undeliberated,
and unapproved.
—Joanne Yatvin
There's nothing
wrong with saying,
"These are my friends, people I trust, people I've
known and worked with for years." Nothing wrong there.
But there is something wrong if such hiring practices
or endorsements are posed as "scientifically based." This
is not unlike someone giving a State of the Union address
and stating something as "fact" when several
agencies of government know it to be in error or misinformation. (By
2006, the Education Department's Inspector General would
discover 51 pages worth of inappropriate behavior and conflicts
of interest in the Bush administration's Reading First
program—see Reading
Scandal.)
Just how "unscientific" the
reform movement can be is described by a dissident member
(Joanne
Yatvin)
of the National Reading Panel who claims that
with five months remaining before the NRP report was to be given to Congress,
the "phonics"
topic was turned over to an independent researcher outside
the panel, completed, and then dropped in the lap of the
NRP four days before press time. Yatvin wrote: "Thus
the phonics report became part of the full report of the
NRP uncorrected, undeliberated, and unapproved." Peer
review, an essential ingredient in scientific research,
was nonexistent here. This also seriously undermines the
credibility of Education Secretary Paige's claim
that the Reading Panel "screened more than 100,000
studies of reading" in compiling its phonics report,
when only 428 actually were examined. For more on the NRP
report and Yatvin's findings, click on NRP.
By 2008, the
U.S. Department of Education's research arm came to the
same conclusion, just months after the department's Inspector
General listed 51 pages of conflicts of interest at Reading
First. (See
Reading Conflicts.)
Among many reasons
for "grave
concern" is the age-old quest for education miracles,
the thought that government regulation could possibly be
a cure-all. And when government proposes a cure-all
but can't come up with the promised results, how much will
it bend the rules to create those results? For a look at
the desperate bending that took place in Texas, check
out:
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