Part 2: Red State Governors Pick Up Where DeVos Left Off

More than 15 years before the Trumpers arrived in DC to initiate the latest "back to basic stupidity" era in all things social, cultural, economic, and intellectual, there was another Republican, George W. Bush, who had his own particular backwards fixation, which found its way into education policy in general and K-3 reading instruction in particular. 

Following his appointment to the Presidency by the Supreme Court in December 2000, Bush's first big initiative was No Child Left Behind, and reading instruction was the centerpiece of that legislation. 

In shaping NCLB reading policy, Bush leaned heavily on NIH neuropsychologist and self-declared reading guru, Reid Lyon, who viewed learning to read "the right way" as important for neural wiring as it was for academic success.  In a 2002 speech, Lyon told a group of Maryland teachers that "[w]e have to realize that education has to take on the same importance as medicine. . . . Teachers are the best brain surgeons around, the best at developing the nervous system." 

Lyon's enthusiasm for regimented phonics instruction as the best way to hard-wire receptive, convergent learners was matched by his animosity toward professional teacher preparation and research-based methods for teaching reading that go beyond . Just two months after Lyon spoke to Maryland teachers about the importance of their craft, he said this at a national policy forum:  "If there was any piece of legislation that I could pass it would be to blow up colleges of education."

Five years later, however, Lyon was helping to launch a for-profit college of education focused on preparing reading teachers the way God and Reid Lyon intended (my bolds): 

What I learned at NIH and what guides our course development at American College of Education is that children's brains can literally be molded, changed, by the teaching they receive. Our goal now is to close the gap between our science tells us about learning and what our teachers apply in the classroom. A graduate degree from American College of Education means that teachers know the science behind how children learn.

Despite five years and over $5 billion spent on Reading First federal discretionary grants that were used to cajole, pressure, and bribe school systems to adopt and implement direct phonics instruction methods, DOE's own research, in both the interim and final reports, showed that Reading First was a big flop. From the NCEE Final Report Summary: 

The findings presented in this report are generally consistent with findings presented in the study's Interim Report, which found statistically significant impacts on instructional time spent on the five essential components of reading instruction promoted by the program (phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension) in grades one and two, and which found no statistically significant impact on reading comprehension as measured by the SAT 10. 

To add insult to Lyon's injury, a 2007 study by the federal "What Works Clearinghouse" found that the only reading program to pass muster in all reading domains was one that Reid Lyon and the Reading First goons had excluded for its lack of fidelity to the reductionist catechism preferred by right-wing code breakers. From Education Week:

Just one program was found to have positive effects or potentially positive effects across all four of the domains in the review—alphabetics, fluency, comprehension, and general reading achievement. That program, Reading Recovery, an intensive, one-on-one tutoring program, has drawn criticism over the past few years from prominent researchers and federal officials who claimed it was not scientifically based.

Federal officials and contractors tried to discourage states and districts from using Reading Recovery in schools participating in the federal Reading First program, citing a lack of evidence that it helps struggling readers.

The bankruptcy of current education reform initiatives is evident in ongoing attempts to resuscitate explicit, phonics-based methods that seeks to convert learners into compliant code breakers and rule followers, thus using neurological and behavioral patterning to influence children's brain functions. Phonics fanatics believe this can be done "during the reading initiation phase." 

Part 3 will examine the latest efforts to impose the antiquarian science of reading in South Carolina and Tennessee.

Gerald Coles Documents the Re-emergence of the Phonics Zombies

…it is the sign of a competent “crap detector” that he is not completely captivated by the arbitrary abstractions of the community in which he happened to grow up. Teaching as a Subversive Activity, p. 17

Midway through the first decade of this century's widespread reading instruction malpractice that was enforced by No Child Left Behind and funded by the corrupt Reading First program, the U. S. Department of Education released a long-awaited study that identified the most effective reading programs used in American schools.  

The direct instruction and phonics zealots, who had seized control of the federal Reading First billions in 2002, could not have been more unhappy with the results.

The study, released by the What Works Clearinghouse, found that the balanced program known as Reading Recovery, which Bush II's chief reading ideologues had singled out as dangerously "non-scientific," was the only program in the study "found to have positive effects or potentially positive effects across all four of the domains in the review—alphabetics, fluency, comprehension, and general reading achievement:"

. . . .That program, Reading Recovery, an intensive, one-on-one tutoring program, has drawn criticism over the past few years from prominent researchers and federal officials who claimed it was not scientifically based. 

Federal officials and contractors tried to discourage states and districts from using Reading Recovery in schools participating in the federal Reading First program, citing a lack of evidence that it helps struggling readers. . . .

That was then, this is now, and just as the phonics zombies have been re-animated repeatedly over the past century by the spirit of corrupt and oppressive fanaticism, the phonics zombies have once more been turned loose to restore a fearful order and intellectual rigor mortis among poor black and brown children everywhere.

Fortunately, Gerald Coles has once more activated his dedicated crap detection unit, which Coles has grown over the past 30 years for just such occasions. Coles has penned an astute synopsis of the current state of affairs in the latest not-so-great awakening of the phonics zombies, and it is a must read for everyone, whether or not you have read his very important book from 2003 on the hegemonic ideology of reading "scientists." Here's a clip from Cryonics Phonics: Inequality’s Little Helper:

. . . . As I noted at the beginning of this article, the new insistence that phonics-heavy reading instruction can provide the pathway to academic success, regardless of the poverty afflicting students, spotlights the beginning-reading program in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Reporting on the instruction in Bethlehem, journalist Emily Hanford insists that hundreds of scientific studies have “shown over and over that virtually all kids can learn to read,” if they are taught to read with a method in which “explicit, systematic phonics instruction” is central.

The 60-plus years of the resurrection and failure of phonics to overcome the impact of poverty on educational achievement leaves the question of the “science” purportedly supporting phonics. Can it be that phonics instruction does indeed have substantial scientific evidence favoring it, but it has not been deployed properly in the classroom?

It’s not apparent what “science” Hanford has in mind, but having written about the research on reading, learning disabilities, and dyslexia since the late 1980s, beginning with my first book, The Learning Mystique (1987), what’s clear about this so-called “science” is that much of it is contrived evidence to “prove” pre-existing conclusions. For example, Hanford is much taken with the research on dyslexia, which has searched for neurological dysfunction in beginning readers. However, she fails to consider the decades-long confusion in this research of correlation and causation. That is, the brain functioning of poor readers (“dyslexics”) is different from that of competent readers, but that is largely because of a difference in competence. Similarly, for example, readers able to read Czech will show brain functioning different from those who cannot, but that is not reason to brand the latter as “czechlexic.” (See my essay on the deficiencies of this research in “Brain Activity, Genetics, and Learning to Read” in Handbook of Early Childhood Literacy, Joanne Larson and Jackie Marsh, eds., 2012).

Hanford frequently references the “science” on the side of heavy-phonics-and-skills-instruction-for-reading-success, but offers nothing about the evidence on the other side of the dispute. Neither does she explore the purported “scientific evidence” the George W. Bush educators used to push through the mandated skills-based instruction, purportedly based on “the findings of years of scientific research on reading,” that subsequently failed children who were victims of it. (For a thorough review of this bogus “evidence” see my Reading the Naked Truth).

NCTE Sells Out: Supports Learn Act

Suddenly I am ashamed to have ever been a member. From Dr. Krashen's blog:

The NCTE is supporting the LEARN act and asks NCTE members to support it. (http://www.ncte.org/action/alerts/learn)

I do not support the LEARN Act. As described in the Senate Bill, the LEARN Act is Reading First expanded to all levels. It is Reading First on steroids.

The methods required by LEARN are nearly identical to those promoted by NCLB and Reading First: "… systematic, and explicit instruction in phonological awareness, phonic decoding, vocabulary, reading fluency, and reading comprehension."

The Senate bill lists the same areas of instruction that were in the report of the National Reading Panel, which was heavily criticized by some of the most respected scholars in the field. These principles were used by Reading First, which failed every empirical test. LEARN assumes that direct instruction is the only way children become literate, that "The intellectual and linguistic skills necessary for writing and reading must be developed through explicit, intentional, and systematic language activities …" and assumes that there is no contrary view.

LEARN endorses excessive testing, requiring "diagnostic, formative and summative assessments … at all levels." This is an astonishing recommendation at a time when
children are already overwhelmed with tests, when schools are being turned into test-prep academies, and when education is facing severe budget cuts. It also presumes that we do not trust our teachers to evaluate their students.

There is no mention of the most important factor in developing literacy: quality school and classroom libraries, and professional librarians in all schools. The Senate bill only mentions "making available and using diverse texts at the reading, development, and interest level of students" and mentions "library media specialists" only once.

I must ask if those at NCTE who endorse this proposal have actually read it.

Susan Neuman's Continuing Reinvention of Her Bush Years

In an effort to move past the days when she was riding high with Reid Lyon and his urban education "cognitive decapitation" (Kozol term) team at ED's Reading First Office, Susan Neuman has taken up a PR campaign of sorts, which has included a chat with Time Magazine and occasional blog posts, even at liberal sites like HuffPo.

Dr. Neuman has even been gracious enough to share what she learned during her brief, though enthused, tenure as Assistant Secretary at ED from 2002 to 2003. In so doing, it would seem that Neuman is intent upon erasing her image as a avid supporter of the Lyon-Carnine direct instruction ideology that she had previously rejected during a career as a legitimate researcher. This is from a piece on by Andrew Brownstein that examines some of previously unknowns about Susan Neuman:

. . . .P. David Pearson, dean of the University of California-Berkeley's Graduate School of Education, worked with Neuman when they served as co-directors of Michigan's Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Ability. He calls her "a first-rate researcher." But like a lot of Neuman admirers, Pearson observed a dramatic transformation after her appointment by Bush. "Boy, it was a sea change," said Pearson. "Rigor — really the illusion of rigor — rather than resources became her mantra. She was speaking out in favor of approaches she had opposed in her research. She began talking like a true believer." . . . .

Be that as it may, here is what Dr. Neuman had to say in her blog post called "Serving in DC: Been There, Done That":

. . . .Here, then, are my list of lessons learned the hard way.

1.) Don't leave educational reform to the feds. The federal bureaucracy is ill-equipped to shape reform. In my stint [Assistant Secretary of DOE 02-03], the Title I Office (the office that oversees funds aimed at helping high numbers or high percentages of poor children meet state academic standards) had some employees who were well past retirement age. Good-hearted people but not exactly the change-agent types.

May I? Just a few years ago when Susan was serving W. and Rod Paige by leading the charge for the parrot teaching/learning model being force fed by Carnine and Lyon through Reading First, Dr. Neuman was supporting change alright--changing right back to a calcified approach to reading instruction that she believed would solve the problem of too much creativity in the classroom. This is from a news article in October 2002 entitled "End Creative Teaching, Official Says," which is quoted in Elizabeth Debray's legislative history of NCLB:

Susan Neuman said the new federal No Child Left Behind Act, if implemented the right way, will put an end to creative and experimental teaching methods in the nation's classroooms. "It will stifle, and hopefully it will kill (them), said Neuman. "Our children are not laboratory rats" (p. 139).

Now that is some change you can believe in! Of course, that was the bad Susan. Here is more of the good:

2.) Write the re-authorization legislation carefully. NCLB is both poorly implemented and deeply flawed. As a result, there are probably more regulations and revisions to this law than all of the past education bills combined.

3.) Don't insult your clients. Teachers have been blamed, maligned and targeted as failures while it's these very same individuals who are supposedly responsible for school reforms. The next education bill would do well to highlight the many teachers who are changing the odds daily for children in schools, especially in low-income areas.

4.) Listen. Outsiders from research tanks to lobbying groups had evidence that the adequate yearly progress goals of NCLB wouldn't work--that they would vastly overestimate the number of failing schools, and underestimate the number of schools that could be better with only minor tinkering. Instead, the get-tough philosophy has drawn all schools down, giving the false notion that our school systems are not working. They are working for the majority of children.

Excuse my continued interruptions, but "outsiders from research tanks and lobbying groups?" Just a few months back in the June 8 issue of Time, Susan had a different take when she told Claudia Wallis that

. . .there were others in the department, according to Neuman, who saw NCLB as a Trojan horse for the choice agenda — a way to expose the failure of public education and "blow it up a bit," she says. "There were a number of people pushing hard for market forces and privatization."

In the department, not outside. And did Susan know of other insiders who protested about the impossible AYP targets, like Dr. Joseph Johnson,

the federal compensatory education director, [who] told the National Association of Federal Education Program Administators in April 2001: "People are looking at the data and saying, 'This is going to be catastrophic because there are going to be so many low-performing schools and this isn't going to work. Though Johnson urged a more positive response, by June he had submitted his resignation (Debray, 2006, p. 138.

And what are we to make now of this admission, that surely shows that Dr. Neuman has come to accept that as family income goes, so go test scores, yes?

5.) Poverty trumps everything. It's not the "soft bigotry of low expectations" that is the problem with our schools. It's poverty. Children who come to school unhealthy, hungry, yearning for attention and nurturance can hardly concentrate on learning. We need a broader, bolder approach to reform, one that recognizes the inextricable connections between health, social-emotional development, and cognitive growth and learning.

All of us who have been saying the same thing for so many years are glad that Susan has seen the light and smelled the coffee just in time for a new Democratic Administration to be sworn in. In some ways, Susan's last point here helps to clarify her earlier position that so many of her colleagues could not understand, during the time she rallied at ED under the Bush banner of test and punish. Doesn't it clarify her position?

In fact, Neuman has been working on a book to highlight early childhood education interventions, and she is one of three "No Excuses" early childhood experts featured in Paul Tough's big NY Times Magazine piece promoting the Democratic adoption of the Republican agenda for "education reform." Of course, when Tough talks of reforming, he is referring to the kind of re-forming that represents a further sculpting of the same male bovine fecal matter that served to inspire the past eight years of bold bullshit that put business interests over the interests of children and their education.

One of the current Neuman-approved interventions (from her new book) for developing human capital at the pre-school stage of life is called Bright Beginnings. Started on a shoestring, Bright Beginnings is now owned and driven by a Pearson curriculum product, the same Pearson that provides fellowships and financial backing for a non-profit literacy initiative called Jumpstart, which welcomed Susan Neuman to its Board of Directors in 2007.

In the NYTimes Magazine piece mentioned earlier, Tough gushes that Bright Beginnings [is] a "pre-K program in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district in North Carolina that enrolls 4-year-olds who score the lowest on a screening test of cognitive ability and manages to bring most of them up to grade level by the first day of kindergarten."

That's right--now there is "grade level" for beginning kindergarten. And how do we know?

Of course, we have a test to determine that. And a test, too, that was developed by the same scam artists and profiteers that developed DIBELS, which is used across the country to measure the number of nonsense syllables that a small child can say in 60 seconds. DIBELS has made Roland Good, Ruth Kaminski, and their associates rich beyond their wildest dreams, thanks to Reading First contracts.

The DIBELS version for infants and toddlers, such as the ones enrolled in Bright Beginnings in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, is called IGDI. I am not making it up. There is no way you can make this stuff up.

And believe me, when President Obama gets his early childhood education initiative underway, those screaming for accountability the loudest will be the charlatans who brought you IGDI and Pearson products like Bright Beginnings, now sold under the name of Opening the World of Learning.

This page is from the Opening the World of Learning website, which has nothing at all about Pearson on the whole site until you click Buy Now! The page provides a description of the "research" study used in 2005 to assess the effectiveness of the program in Charlotte-Mecklenburg:

A team of five trained assessors completed all testing. The Individual Growth and Development Indicators (IGDI) assessment is a Pre-K version of the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS). Letter naming fluency and IGDI measures were administered to all children attending during the first and last week of the summer school program.

• Letter Naming: Letter naming cards included capital letters only. After naming four capital letters (A-D) presented on practice cards, the child was shown the remaining capital letters of the alphabet one-by-one and asked to name them. If the child correctly named the rest of the letters in less than one minute, the time was recorded as well as the number of letters named correctly.
• 
  
• Picture Naming: Photographs or line drawings of objects (e.g., apple, chair, fish, computer) commonly found in preschoolers' natural environments (i.e., home, classroom, community) were presented one at a time and the child was asked to name them as fast as possible. After one minute, the activity was stopped and the total number of pictures named correctly was recorded. Categories of objects used in the subtest included animals, food, people, household things, games and sports materials, vehicles, tools, and clothing.
• 
  
• Alliteration: Cards with an image (e.g., teeth) at the top and a set of three images in a row at the bottom (e.g., phone, tire, fish) were presented one at a time and the child was asked to point to a picture at the bottom that starts with the same sound as the picture at the top. After two minutes, the activity was stopped and the total number of pictures identified correctly was recorded.
• 
  
• Rhyming: Cards with an image (e.g., mouse) at the top and a set of three images in a row at the bottom (e.g., house, apple, cheese) were presented one at a time and the child was asked to point to a picture at the bottom that sounds the same as (or rhymes with) the picture at the top. After two minutes, the activity was stopped and the total number of pictures identified correctly was recorded.

Kindergarten teachers in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools use DIBELS for progress monitoring and benchmark assessments of their students. Scores on the IDGI provide a baseline for comparison with later performance on DIBELS; they also provide information about a child's performance in summer school.

Bright Beginnings, they call it. Too sad for words.

Dr. Neuman winds up her blog post with this:

Given all these lessons learned, I'm often asked, "Would you still take on the challenge of serving in Washington when you did?" The answer is yes. Our children, our country and our future are too important. . . .

Thank you, Susan, for sharing. Your candor and forthrightness, along with your subtle positioning to get rich during the next Administration's focus on early childhood education, make you someone we should all look up to as an outstanding example of human capital making "education reform" what we all know that it can be.

Put Your DIBELS Handheld in the Garbage

Even though the phonics fanatics, the parrot learning nutjobs, and the edu-profiteers have controlled reading instruction for the past eight years, their gravy train just left the tracks and is now in mid-flight toward the canyon floor below.

First released last June, the final version of a study by Spellings' own research shop shows incontrovertibly that the $6,000,000,000 spent on the direct instruction chain gangs designed for children of the poor benefited no one other than the hacks and hucksters who peddled the junk materials at the behest of the U. S. Department of Education. Now that we know that nothing was gained by this ideology-gone-wild approach to reading instruction, who will determine the harm that has been perpetrated against the most vulnerable children?

Do teachers and principals need any further permission to throw the Sopris West and SRA/McGraw Hill and DIBELS garbage into the garbage? Can we bring back the children's literature now, and can we encourage once again the growth of thinking and imagination in children? And can we prosecute the perpetrators?

From WaPo:

Students in the $6 billion Reading First program have not made greater progress in understanding what they read than have peers outside the program, according to a congressionally mandated study.

The final version of the study, released yesterday by the U.S. Department of Education, found that students in schools that use Reading First, a program at the core of the No Child Left Behind law, scored no better on comprehension tests than students in similar schools that do not get the funding. . . .

Orange Jumpsuits for Reading First Mafia

At the top of the new Attorney General's list of immediate indictments should be the individuals who comprise the network of hacks and ideologues who turned Reading First into their own private financial empire, while irrevocably damaging the healthy development of children across the country. There is a drawer full of Congressional and OIG investigations to draw from, so the leg work should be quite minimal.

The saddest part, as pointed out in this letter from Ken Goodman circulating on the Web, is that the damage continues to accrue to this day:

The easiest, important educational item that the Obama administration could handle is to investigate the left over scandals of the Bush Administration. Reading First involved blatant conflicts of interest resulting in 6 billion dollars being diverted into the pockets of a small group of phonics fanatics and their greedy publishers (McGraw Hill, Scott, Foresman, Sopris West, Voyager). This is all documented by the Inspector General's reports and it is likely to lead into Secretary Spellings's office and the White House. Meanwhile Reading First has been demonstrated in a USDE study to be a failed program.
. . . .

Congress cut off all funding for Reading First, but the illegally negotiated state contracts are still in place with states and local districts still buying and using the illegally mandated texts and tests and the crooks still raking in the profits. Waiting a year to do any thing about this condemns another cohort of kindergarten children to being labeled as failures for flunking DIBELS and many more schools failing AYP.

Tell Congress and the new administration to cleanup this terrible mess.
Ken Goodman

Mother Jones On Randy Best, Reading First, and Education Profiteering

A really nice piece that offers the case of Bush Pioneer, Randy Best, as the quintessential education profiteer among an illustrious collection of slime bag snakeoil salesmen and ideological pitch men and women. Among the cast: M. Spellings and Charles Miller. Here is a small clip:

. . . . launched in 1994, Voyager was Best's first foray into the business of education. After three decades of making money the old-fashioned way, the serial entrepreneur says he caught the philanthropy bug. He launched Voyager as a nonprofit that offered after-school programs as a way to keep latchkey kids engaged in learning. Yet after two years of sluggish growth, he switched to a for-profit model and hired school superintendents from Dallas and a nearby suburb to pitch the program to their former colleagues. Business picked up, and Best became a believer in a market-driven approach to social problems. "If you become a for-profit, then every single person in the organization is incentivized to do what you are trying to do," he explains. "Their rational self-interest is at stake; it is not just always trying to do something for the greater good."

Voyager enjoyed an enviably cozy relationship with its customers. After Texas' education commissioner intervened to help the company dodge child care regulations, competitors complained that it had cashed in on its connections. In 1998, Best and his investors donated more than $45,000 to Bush's gubernatorial reelection campaign. (Best says they supported Bush "because he was billing himself as the education governor," not because they expected anything in return.) That August, Bush dropped in on a Houston elementary school and spoke in front of a Voyager banner. Touting the benefits of for-profit after-school programs, he called for $25 million to fund them across the state.

Voyager's friends in high places were not enough to make it profitable. But by staying close to Bush and his allies, Best learned of new, bigger opportunities. In the mid-'90s, Charles Miller, a Voyager investor and Bush campaign donor, worked with the governor's office to design a new state reading program, the Texas Reading Initiative. Miller's team—"this small little mafia," as he puts it—included Bush's adviser Margaret Spellings and several others who would go on to occupy key positions in Bush's Department of Education in Washington. By 1998, Best had reinvented Voyager as a reading program, hiring researchers who'd worked on the Texas Reading Initiative or had ties to its designers.

Best says the idea for the new direction came from his own experience as a dyslexic and his interest in cutting-edge literacy research. "I think Voyager copied from a lot of the things we did with our reading initiative," Miller says. "Voyager saw that and just got in the draft, so to speak."

In 2000, Best and Miller signed up as Bush Pioneers, pledging to raise at least $100,000 for the governor's presidential run. When Bush entered the Oval Office, his education team included several people with connections to Voyager—and some who went on to work for Best. They set out to implement a revolutionary new policy that, despite the talk of smaller government, essentially put Washington in charge of setting state education standards. Miller helped select former Houston schools superintendent Rod Paige, a longtime Voyager booster, as secretary of education. Bush made G. Reid Lyon, a reading researcher who had consulted on the Texas Reading Initiative, his unofficial reading czar. Lyon cowrote the section of No Child Left Behind that created Reading First, a $6 billion program to fund state literacy curricula that drew upon "scientifically based reading research"—exactly what Voyager had been selling back in Texas. . . .

Reading First: "unproven magnet of corruption"

From USA Today:

WASHINGTON — Is the federal government getting out of the reading business?

The Senate Appropriations Committee voted last week to eliminate funding for Reading First, the groundbreaking but controversial Bush administration program that has given states $1 billion a year since 2002 to teach low-income elementary schoolers to read. A House committee also had voted to eliminate funding; if money is not restored before the federal budget is approved in the fall, the program could end.

Democrats in Congress say the program was an unproven magnet for corruption. House hearings last year focused on financial ties between its top advisers and major textbook publishers, who account for a large share of materials schools use. A U.S. Justice Department investigation, begun last year, is still pending. . . .

First Kill Reading First

The key tool used for the "cognitive decapitation" of the poor, as Kozol refers to today's direct instruction behavioral mod chain gangs, has been enabled by the bribery and corruption induced from the billion dollars a year in federal Reading First grants. Set up from the outset to hammer children into early submission like trained parrots and to measure their success by how many nonsense words they can mouth in 60 seconds (DIBELS), the results couldn't be more clear. Even Grover Whitehurst at ED's own research shop knows an unalterable failure when he sees one.

Now Congress is poised to cut off the funding stream that has made millionaires of Carnine, Lyon, Good, Kaminski, and the rest of the Reading First gang. Our elected representatives should not hesitate any longer to stop this educational genocide. There are truly balanced literacy approaches that work, the same ones that these thugs excluded from their get-rich and make-stupid gravy train that has just run out of track.

A blurb from the Kansas City Star:

Students enrolled in Reading First, a key component of President Bush’s so-called No Child Left Behind law, read no better than students who aren’t in the program, according to a new Department of Education study.

“There was no statistically significant impact on reading comprehension scores in grades one, two, or three,” Grover J. Russ Whitehurst, director of the Institute of Education Sciences at the Department of Education, said.

This comes as no surprise to educators:

“As an experienced teacher of third grade, I am deeply saddened by the Reading First Program. I have been teaching for more than 25 years and I have never seen so many students hurt by something that is supposed to be helpful,” writes one educator. “… The focus is on fluency and not comprehension.”

Gary Stager's "The Surge Against First Graders"

From Huffington Post, posted May 8:

by Gary Stager

When overseas colleagues criticize American foreign policy, I've been known to respond, "If you like Iraq, you'll love what the Bush administration has done to public education." Late last week, the US Department of Education proved my point when they released the Reading First Impact Study: Interim Report.

Like the invasion of Iraq or the disastrous Katrina aftermath, Reading First is the latest in a string of colossal failures of the Bush administration. As in the other cases of malfeasance, the White House is spinning news of the Reading First fiasco. This denial of culpability has gone unchallenged by the mainstream media disinterested in matters of education policy. Children and our economic security are the ultimate losers.

Reading First is the centerpiece of the Bush Administration's unprecedented takeover of public education, No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Public school teachers and students have endured a half dozen years of terror as NCLB used shame, blame and crackpot theories to turn classrooms into Dickensian test-prep sweatshops devoid of creativity, joy or relevance. Veteran educators were handed scripts to follow, rather than teach.

The recent report concludes, "Reading First did not improve students' reading comprehension... The program did not increase the percentages of students in grades one, two or three whose reading comprehension scores were at or above grade level." In other words, a $6 billion federal program spending had no positive impact. Additionally, local school districts have made inestimable investments to support Reading First.

The failure of Reading First represents more than a course correction for a well-intentioned attempt to benefit the nation's children. Reading First was rife with politics, contempt for professional educators and conflicts of interest from the outset. It is particularly ironic that an administration insistent that every classroom practice must adhere to "scientifically-based research," to the exclusion of research it did not like, continues to insist that Reading First should be the law of the land, despite its own evidence to the contrary.

How did we get here?

Faulty Intelligence
Like the invasion of Iraq, Reading First was justified with ideological theories and bogus intelligence. NCLB and Reading First were based on the purported success of the "Houston Miracle" from when George W. Bush was Governor of Texas and his first secretary of education, Rod Paige, was the Superintendent of the Houston Schools. Although the "miracle" was quickly exposed as a fraud in which data was cooked in an Enron-like fashion and at-risk students disappeared, Congress decided that what flopped so spectacularly in Houston should be applied to the nation.

Profiteering
Reading First has its own Halliburton and Blackwater-like profiteers. In 2006, I wrote an analysis of the Department of Education Inspector General's report detailing the widespread corruption, cronyism and fraud endemic in Reading First. Untested and obscure strategies, such as Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) reduced reading to a series of one-minute tests of mechanics having nothing to do with students understanding what they read. DIBELS went from obscurity to ubiquity virtually overnight and made millions for its creators.

A handful of textbook publishers were greatly enriched while others were demonized and their books declared ineligible for purchase. Internal Department of Education memos indicate a conscious effort to create winners and losers in the marketplace. Before being forced to resign in 2006, Reading First Director Christopher Doherty called representatives from publishers the program shunned "dirtbags" and "would-be party crashers" and said, "We need to beat the [expletive] out of them."

The Connection to September 11, 2001
Reading First even has connections to 9/11. As the terrorists attacked the United States, President Bush was in a classroom where a teacher read The Pet Goat to a group of young children. The trip was part of a calculated campaign to sell No Child Left Behind and Reading First.

The Pet Goat is an exercise from a "literary classic" titled, Reading Mastery 2, by the father of Direct Instruction, Siegfried (Zig) Engelmann. In the 1960s, Engelmann invented a controversial pedagogical approach that reduces knowledge to bite-sized chunks presented in a prescribed sequence enforced by a scripted lesson the teacher is to recite to a classroom of pupils chanting predetermined responses. Every single word the teacher is to utter, including permissible and prohibited words of encouragement, are provided. There is no room for individuality. The Direct Instruction Web site states, "The popular valuing of teacher creativity and autonomy as high priorities must give way to a willingness to follow certain carefully prescribed instructional practices."

Engelmann also said, "We don't give a damn what the teacher thinks, what the teacher feels."

Engelmann's publisher, textbook giant, McGraw-Hill, has ties to the Bush family dating back to the 1930s. Company namesakes served on George W. Bush's transition team and the board of his mother's literacy foundation. The publishers received honors from both Bush administrations and they in turn bestowed awards on Secretary Rod Paige, who then keynoted their business conference. The company's former executive vice president was the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, National Intelligence Czar and current Assistant Secretary of State, John Negroponte. Direct instruction became synonymous with the "scientifically based methods" required by No Child Left Behind and Reading First.

Direct Instruction appears as effective at teaching reading comprehension as the War in Iraq is at spreading democracy.

Enemies Everywhere
On February 23, 2004, then Education Secretary, Rod Paige called the nation's largest teacher's union, "a terrorist organization" during a meeting with the National Governor's Association. Two years earlier, Reid Lyon, one of the architects of NCLB and Reading first said the following in a government-sponsored forum, "If there was any piece of legislation that I could pass it would be to blow up colleges of education." These are just two examples of the paranoia manifest by the "you're either with us or against us" worldview, even when the declared enemies happen to be your child's teacher.

The Surge
Underlying Reading First is one of the religious right's favorite issues, phonics instruction. Educators have long understood that some students need help sounding out words while learning to read. However, the "reading wars" is an offensive by neoconservatives and religious fundamentalists convinced that every child learns to read in exactly the same way by being taught 43 phonemic sounds in a lockstep sequence. Some suspect that the promotion of "highly structured, systematic sequential explicit phonics" instruction is a Trojan horse for public school privatization while others suggest that phonics is embraced by religious fundamentalists happy to reduce reading to the literal interpretation of text. Either way, Reading First is the federal government's program for mandating uniform phonics instruction. Any parent who has watched a child spontaneously learn to read must question mechanistic theories of human development that oversimplify complex issues.

The Department of Education's attempt to spin the devastating conclusions of their own Reading First evaluation demonstrates how they are fueled by phonics fanaticism and choose failed ideology over science. The Department of Education made the incredulous claim that the Secretary of Education planned to look at the study "to inform our efforts," and would "look forward to reviewing the final report." Then they started spinning.

According to the May 1st edition of USA Today,

"On the plus side, researchers found that Reading First teachers spent more time emphasizing phonics and other aspects of what many experts consider solid instruction -- about 10 minutes more a day, or nearly an hour more a week. "Teachers' behavior was changed," Institute of Education Sciences Director Whitehurst says.

The White House wants us to believe that teachers spending more time executing a failed strategy is cause for celebration. Reading First doesn't work, but the good news is teachers are doing more of it -- all in the name of science. Got it?

Mission accomplished!

Apparently, what our schools really need is a phonics surge against little children, the collateral victims of Reading First.

The Struggle to Keep the Reading First Gravy Train on Track

Soon after the Supreme Court settled the Presidential election for us in late 2000, the phonics zealots of Governor Bush’s reading czar, Reid Lyon, along with the scripted direct instruction (DI) lieutenants of Sig Engelmann disciple, Doug Carnine, took an ideologically-corrupted National Reading Panel report to devise a federal program for early reading instruction and intervention, aimed at molding and controlling the neurological development and behaviors of the children of the poor. (See examples here and ask yourself if middle class parents would ever allow their children to attend one of these incarceration centers called Title I schools).

This program would become Reading First, the centerpiece of the new Title I under what we now fondly refer to as NCLB. And with the same conservative cronies who drafted the program in charge of selecting recipients of the $1,000,000,000 a year in federal reading grants to the states, it didn’t take long for word to get out on which literacy approaches that the Paige/Spellings shop would fund and which they would not. The full extent of the corruption remains unknown, but Congressional testimony and ED’s own Inspector General uncovered enough to show why DI, DIBELS, and phonics now rule in schools with large numbers of poor children. It also offers enough details to see how corporate and academic and bureaucratic insiders got fabulously wealthy in the process.

Last year Congress acted to slash funding of the Cronies, er, Reading First program. So now while we wait to see if the Inspector General’s referral to the Justice Department will lead to a criminal investigation and/or indictments, Margaret Spellings is making the rounds advising cash-starved state departments of education on how to re-direct federal funds to make sure that the gravy train doesn’t get derailed and to make sure that the “cognitive decapitation” (Kozol’s term) of poor, minority children continues unabated.

In the meantime, many states are stuck with the parrot reading programs approved by the Lyon-Carnine Cabal, such as McGraw-Hill’s Open Court (or as reading teachers refer to it, Open Cult). And what about the balanced, humane, and marginalized programs like Reading Recovery, which was systematically excluded by the goon squad of Reading First Director, Chris Doherty? In the Fed’s own research last year, reported by Education Week, Reading Recovery was the only program "found to have positive effects or potentially positive effects across all four of the domains in the review—alphabetics, fluency, comprehension, and general reading achievement:"

. . . .That program, Reading Recovery, an intensive, one-on-one tutoring program, has drawn criticism over the past few years from prominent researchers and federal officials who claimed it was not scientifically based.

Federal officials and contractors tried to discourage states and districts from using Reading Recovery in schools participating in the federal Reading First program, citing a lack of evidence that it helps struggling readers. . . .

Is Margaret Spellings advocating for a reconsideration of all Reading First grant funding decisions in light of these new findings? Any guesses?

Reading Recovery Receives Top Marks in Federal Research

Six years ago when Margaret LaMontagne (Spellings), Reid Lyon, and Doug Carnine loaded the Reading First review panels with their direct instruction stooges and cronies, they set back reading instruction by decades, who knows how many. As ED's own Inspector General's reports have shown, states that applied for Reading First grants were manhandled into choosing reading programs aligned with the Lyon and Carnine back-to-brutality phonics orthodoxy. And if grantees ended up off the direct instruction reservation, Reid Lyon's Reading First Director, Chris Doherty, could simply pull the plug, as he did in Rockford, Illinois:

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 Lyon and Carnine Cabal's most hated reading program was the balanced literacy methodology of Reading Recovery, a holistic and humane literacy approach grounded by empirical research. It is suitably ironic, then, that Ed Week reports that Reading Recovery has emerged in the latest federal research from Spellings's own shop as the only program "found to have positive effects or potentially positive effects across all four of the domains in the review—alphabetics, fluency, comprehension, and general reading achievement:"

. . . .That program, Reading Recovery, an intensive, one-on-one tutoring program, has drawn criticism over the past few years from prominent researchers and federal officials who claimed it was not scientifically based.

Federal officials and contractors tried to discourage states and districts from using Reading Recovery in schools participating in the federal Reading First program, citing a lack of evidence that it helps struggling readers. . . .

How sweet it is!! It's just too bad that so many states are now stuck with the McGraw-Hill Open Court parrot reading system that they were force fed by hacks and crooks in order to get Reading First grants.

Reading First and Direct Instruction: A Reprise

For those who would like a good summary of events and players within the Reading First corruption crimes brought to full light last year, check out this one at Institute for Language and Education Policy. Here is a brief clip related to Reid Lyon's handsome young Direct Instruction disciple and protege, Chris Doherty, who was hand selected by Lyon and Neuman to head the billion dollar a year federal program with credentials that would not justify appointment to a principalship (good background on Chris here):

The three people Doherty nominated with connections to DI reviewed 23 state applications, according to the OIG. When a Baltimore school official complained to the department about possible conflicts, the report said, Doherty e-mailed one of the panelists he had selected, “You know the line from Casablanca, ‘I am SHOCKED that there is gambling going on in this establishment!’ Well, ‘I am SHOCKED that there are pro-DI people on this panel!’”

Based on this and other e-mail exchanges with the panelists, the OIG concluded that Doherty’s actions exhibited an “apparent intent to include and give a significant role to panelists who reflected his personal preference in reading programs.” In fact, said the OIG, Doherty’s response to a similar internal e-mail discussing Reading Recovery “suggest[s] that he may indeed have intended to ‘stack’ the expert review panel.”

In another instance, the report said, Doherty worked to ensure that a commercial reading program that relies on DI was featured more prominently in Maryland’s list of reading programs used by the state’s districts and schools to qualify for Reading First funds. Reading Mastery, published by SRA-McGraw Hill, is the most widely used reading program to utilize DI. Doherty said in an e-mail that “we need to ENSURE that when MD *does* do its application ... that Reading Mastery is NOT relegated to supplemental status, which would be HORRIBLE for so many ... schools in Balt[imore].”

Subsequent to Doherty’s intervention, according to the OIG report, Reading Mastery became one of Maryland’s seven core reading programs, raising “a question as to whether he was acting with the restraint envisioned by Congress.”

In poking around at the Association for Direct Instruction yesterday, I came across the announcement for THE 22ND ANNUAL ATLANTIC COAST DIRECT INSTRUCTION CONFERENCE & INSTITUTE. And kicking off the Conference in Harrisburg this year is none other than Mrs. Doherty, Laura, who has been a trainer now at ADI since the late 1990s, long before her husband was put in charge of force feeding a chain gang curriculum to America's poor schools. I would guess that business is booming.

Essentials of Coaching................................................Laura Doherty

The Big Business of Education Reform

There was good reason for educational publishing and testing corporations to celebrate Bush's arrival in Washington. After looking at the President's planned initiatives for state testing, Chief executive of Pearson Education, Peter Jovanovich, quipped to Education Week in February, 2001: "This almost reads like our business plan."

With the growing list of investigations and the widening coverage of complaints by those shut out of the insider feeding frenzy at US DOE (click here for news of another complaint filed by Robert Slavin in June), it is becoming easier to see the cozy relations among federal consultants and researchers, and the companies for which these same consultant and researchers devise solutions that are then recommendeded by US DOE, often receiving Federal money to sustain their product development and market their products.

Here is the way it works. The DOE recruits the true believers in the version of "scientifically-based" literacy that the President's advisor and enforcer, Reid Lyon, has placed front and center in the intellectually dishonest National Reading Panel Report. The DOE then sponsors studies, recruits academics, issues reports, and funds efforts to advance strategies that advocate the preferred solution. As the USA Today article points out, "since Reading First's inception in 2002, several well-known reading experts have both advised states on federal grant applications and worked for major publishers. Publisher Scott Foresman touts two former Reading First officials on its website."

In fact, McGraw-Hill, the Bush family favorite, is now taking on an assertive tone in their public financial pronouncements, or is that just a cozy confidence. They tout their "broad base of knowledge about what is happening across state lines." Indeed. And they are obviously proud of their overlapping roles as congressional advisor, grass roots consultant, policy expert, psychometric high priest:

While we have no interaction in creating general social policy, we do have conversations with members of Congress advising on technical issues. We work across all states, and are a contractor for 23 different states, so have a broad base of knowledge about what's happening across the nation for anyone drafting legislation at this time.

As states and districts implement NCLB--in the earlier grades and potentially at the high school level--we encourage educators, administrators, and policy makers to consult with us. CTB/McGraw-Hill can provide valuable policy resources, technical assistance, and advice. We are not only the leading publisher of educational assessments in the United States; we are also a key resource for information on standards and testing. Our national team of Evaluation Consultants is involved at a grass-roots level in each state-- meeting with educators, helping districts and schools understand the impact of the new law, and offering solutions that meet both the letter and spirit of the law--to improve teaching and learning.

Yes, yes, let's not forget teaching and learning.

It's Official--Reading First is Under Investigation

USA Today reported on August 7 that Senator Richard Lugar's office has confirmed that the US DOE's Inspector General has opened an investigation into allegations of impropriety and favoritism (in Iraq they call it profiteering) in the letting of contracts for Reading First's one billion dollars dispensed annually to make sure that phonics fanaticism becomes the operative literacy strategy in American schools. This is part of the letter that Lugar sent to Maggie Spellings on June 10:

"At best, it seems that there has been a lack of clarity" about what programs qualify for funding. "At worst, one or more officials contracted to work for the Department of Education may be working to further their own interests."

Imagine that!

More Investigations at US DOE

The Reading Recovery Council of North America (RRCNA), which offers a truly balanced reading alternative to the drill and kill phonics approach favored by the current regime in Washington, has requested a federal investigation into the implementation practices of Reading First. Reading First is part of the NCLB reading improvement initiative that shovels out a billion dollars a year to raise reading scores, most of it going to test prep and scripted teaching programs developed by McGraw-Hill (click here for an interesting article on the Bush/McGraw Hill connection), Harcourt, and other friends and large contributors.

Cited in RRCNA's letter to the Inspector General are these points:

1. State and local control. The implementation of Reading First has restricted state and local control in the selection of scientifically based reading programs.

2. One-to-one instruction. The Department has excluded one-to-one instruction in the Reading First program, contradicting the authorizing statute, congressional intent, and scientific research findings of effectiveness for the lowest-achieving children.

3. Selective application of scientifically based research criteria. In the implementation of Reading First, the Department has systematically favored some programs while excluding other programs with a scientific research base.

4. Misinformation about Reading Recovery. The Department has supported a quiet yet pervasive misinformation campaign against Reading Recovery despite a large body of research demonstrating Reading Recovery’s effectiveness and long-term results.

Complaint #4 focuses on an administration that has perfected the art of sliming its opponents, and the hacks running the show at US DOE are no different. The sham of "scientifically-based research" has been made clear by Gerald Coles (reviewed here) and others who have examined the propaganda piece, the National Reading Panel Report, that provides the foundation for all this fanatical phonics phenomenon that dismisses any study that does not echo the party line--and eventually disregards excellent well-documented strategies that improve literacy and thinking.

Does Testing Children Make Adults Stupid, Too?

Evidence is now emerging that the current testing frenzy sweeping the nation is having a similar stupidifying effect on adults that it has on the children who are being tested. In Colorado, for instance, the Rocky Mountain News reports that flattening reading scores have caused some school officials to react in ways that would suggest a total loss of rationality. Here are the trends in reading (a totally predictable leveling) that have Colorado educators wringing their hands babbling to one another:

The percentage of Colorado fourth- through 10th-graders reading at or above grade level increased from 2002 to 2003, but has remained fairly flat ever since.

• 2002 58.6
• 2003 65.0
• 2004 65.1
• 2005 65.6

To boost test scores, one literacy director proposes to consciously drain any remaining joy of learning all the way down to kindergarten: "We need to prepare our students at an earlier age," DeLong said. "Even at the kindergarten level, we need to get kids to think about what they're reading or what's being read to them." Hmm, I wonder how that will work for children at this developmental level--and how that will help those stubborn scores in 4th grade.

Other signs that testing might be associated with adult literacy directors losing their minds can be seen in the belief that namby-pamby narrative literature might the culprit in these pancaking test scores. Bring on more more structure, more non-fiction, Delong says--boys like it, and boys need to raise their scores more than girls.

The article does close, however, with evidence that there may be hope for a restoration of sanity once the National Reading Panel propaganda (as documented in the book reviewed here) is put in the garbage can, along with the drill-and-kill curricula that it has inspired:

Judith Casey, the immediate past president of the Colorado Council of the International Reading Association, theorized that the more structured reading programs some districts implement with Reading First funds may have contributed to the state's flat scores.

"With older kids," she said, "I wonder if that's leading to boredom and limited student investment because they're really not given the opportunity to do thinking on their own."

Imagine that!