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.

Reading First and the Breaking of Federal Law

As a result of a nice piece of reporting from Kathleen Manzo at Ed Week, we now can see deeper into the inner workings of the Reading First corruption scandal that is still waiting for Congress to care enough to do something about it. In the meantime, of course, an entire generation of children are learning codebreaking rather than thinking as a result stormtrooper tactics by these dangerous crackpots with links all the way into the White House.

What Manzo's piece shows is a lean direct chain of command from Spellings to Reid Lyon to Reading First Director, Chris Doherty, who lost his job when the OIG first issued its report detailing some of the corrupt bullying that was standard operating procedure by political hacks and crazed ideologues, whose agenda could not deterred by the requirements of the Law. Just one example from of Chris-stroking that comes from the West Wing office of Spellings through her conduit, Reid Lyon: "Mr. Lyon: 'wow – Talk about a guy with smarts, integrity AND balls,” he wrote. “I am talking about you Chris'."

Balls, indeed. A big clip:

E-Mails Reveal Federal Reach Over Reading
Communications show pattern of meddling in ‘Reading First.’

By Kathleen Kennedy Manzo

The Reading First initiative’s 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; and

• 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’," 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.

E-mail Excerpts

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
SOURCE: National Institutes of Health

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," 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. . . .

More Reading First Revelations: Doherty, Lyon, and Carnine, Oh My

Chris Doherty, the soon-to-be ex-Director of Reading First, was described by a Washington researcher I heard from today as an "absolute imbecile." In other words, perfect for a job that required a lot of "bold" and "extra-legal" actions to make sure that, 1) the Bush Co. phonics and chain gang ideology got enforced, and 2) that Bush cronies got the majority of the billions pumping out of ED for Reading First during the past five years. Here is a verbatim clip from the Inspector General's Report that suggests my Washington acquaintance was right--Doherty is very bold, very arrogant, very much blinded by power, and in the end, very stupid:

The Department Took Action With Respect to the Expert Review Panel Process That Was Contrary to the Balanced Panel Composition Envisioned by Congress
Congress, through Title 1, Part B, Section 1203(c)(2)(A) of the ESEA, envisioned an expert review panel with equal representation from the Department, NIFL, NAS, and NICHD. As we reported in Finding 1A, the Department nominated a majority of the individuals serving on the expert review panel. Additionally, 15 of the 16 subpanels had a majority of Department- nominated panelists and none had the balanced composition envisioned by Congress.

The Reading First Director took direct action to ensure that a particular approach to reading instruction was represented on the expert review panel. Direct Instruction (DI) is a model for teaching that requires the use of Reading Mastery, a program published by SRA/McGraw-Hill, to teach reading. The Reading First Director formerly served as the Executive Director of the Baltimore Curriculum Project, which has implemented DI in Baltimore City schools since 1996.

The Reading First Director personally nominated three individuals who had significant professional connections to DI to serve on the expert review panel. The Reading First Directorselected these three individuals to serve on a total of seven of the 16 subpanels and one of these individuals to serve as the panel chair on five subpanels. These three individuals were collectively involved in reviewing a total of 23 States’ applications.

A Baltimore City Public Schools official contacted a Department official to express concern that two panelists were involved with or employed by DI and questioned whether those two panelists indicated their connections to DI on the conflict of interest form. In May 2002, the Department official forwarded this information to the Reading First Director who passed the concerns on to one of the panelists in question as a “Confidential FYI.” This panelist replied:

I suspect that [the Baltimore City Public Schools official’s] assumption is that USDE must be warned that there may be DI infiltrators and that somehow USDE knows how dangerous that can be. You may remember that [the Baltimore City Public Schools official] is a whole language (now called Balanced Literacy) proponent.

The subsequent e-mail response from the Reading First Director suggests his intention to ensure a DI presence on the expert review panel: “Funny that [the Baltimore City Public Schools official] calls *me* to inform that there may be some pro-DI folks on *my* panel!!! Too rich!” The panelist then asked, “Does he know who you are? Past and present?” The Reading First Director replied, “That’s the funniest part – yes! 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!’”

Shortly before this exchange, a Department employee reported to the Reading First Director that the Department had received a question from a member of the media about the panel composition. The response by the Reading First Director suggests that he may indeed have intended to “stack” the expert review panel. The employee stated: “The question is...are we going to ‘stack the panel’ so programs like Reading Recovery don’t get a fair shake[?]” The Reading First Director responded, “‘Stack the panel?’...I have never *heard* of such a thing....[.]”

A few days before the Department publicly announced the panelists it had chosen to serve, one of the Department-nominated panelists contacted the Reading First Director and shared his strong bias against Reading Recovery and his strategy for responding to any State that planned to include Reading Recovery in its application. The Reading First Director responded: “I really like the way you’re viewing/approaching this, and not just because it matches my own approach :-), I swear!” This individual later served as the panel chair for the subpanel that reviewed Wisconsin’s State application and in response to the State’s plans to use Reading Recovery, he included an 11-page negative review of Reading Recovery in his official comments on the application.

Around the same time, Reid Lyon, the former Chief of the Child Development & Behavior Branch at the NICHD, advised the Reading First Director, the Assistant Secretary for OESE, and the Senior Advisor to the Secretary at the time that one of the panelists had been “actively working to undermine the NRP [National Reading Panel] Report and the RF initiatives.” Lyon further stated, “Chances are that other reviewers can trump any bias on her part.” In a written response to all of the people involved, the former Senior Advisor to the Secretary stated, “We can’t un-invite her. Just make sure she is on a panel with one of our barracuda types.”

The statute envisioned that the expert review panel would be balanced with representatives from the Department and three other named organizations. In fact, virtually all of the subpanels had a majority of Department-nominated panelists. Against this backdrop, the actions of the Director and the former Senior Advisor to the Secretary become particularly problematic.

Additionally, the first element identified in GAO’s Standards for Internal Control in the Federal Government as affecting the control environment is “the integrity and ethical values maintained and demonstrated by management and staff.” The apparent intent of the Reading First Director to include and to give a significant role to panelists who reflected his personal preference in reading programs; his specific encouragement to a panelist who held views similar to his on Reading Recovery; and the intention of the former Senior Advisor to the Secretary to control another panelist raise significant questions about the control environment in which the program was being managed. (pp. 17-19)

More clips and more Panel members to be identified soon. Carnine's Oregon cabal is so busted.

Reid, Chris, and the Barracudas: More from Reading First Finding #4

(Photo: Reid Lyon, Bush's Former Crackpot Reading Czar)
This OIG Report is only the first in a series that is planned for Reading First before the end of this year, but don't expect OIG to name names. That will only come with a criminal investigation or from a filing for OIG documents under the Freedom of Information Act. Or from a reporter with the resources and the gumption to get the facts. Any formal investigation aimed at getting the facts will have to be launched from outside ED, unless Spellings intends to surrender and resign.

There is so much rich and readable detail in this section on how Doherty, Lyon, unnamed panelists, and senior advisors stacked the deck to make sure that Direct Instruction beat out all comers that I have posted this section in its entirety from the OIG Report:

The Department Took Action With Respect to the Expert Review Panel Process That Was Contrary to the Balanced Panel Composition Envisioned by Congress

Congress, through Title 1, Part B, Section 1203(c)(2)(A) of the ESEA, envisioned an expert review panel with equal representation from the Department, NIFL, NAS, and NICHD. As we reported in Finding 1A, the Department nominated a majority of the individuals serving on the expert review panel. Additionally, 15 of the 16 subpanels had a majority of Department-nominated panelists and none had the balanced composition envisioned by Congress.

The Reading First Director took direct action to ensure that a particular approach to reading instruction was represented on the expert review panel. Direct Instruction (DI) is a model for teaching that requires the use of Reading Mastery, a program published by SRA/McGraw-Hill, to teach reading. The Reading First Director formerly served as the Executive Director of the Baltimore Curriculum Project, which has implemented DI in Baltimore City schools since 1996.

The Reading First Director personally nominated three individuals who had significant professional connections to DI to serve on the expert review panel. The Reading First Director selected these three individuals to serve on a total of seven of the 16 subpanels and one of these individuals to serve as the panel chair on five subpanels. These three individuals were collectively involved in reviewing a total of 23 States’ applications.

A Baltimore City Public Schools official contacted a Department official to express concern that two panelists were involved with or employed by DI and questioned whether those two panelists indicated their connections to DI on the conflict of interest form. In May 2002, the Department official forwarded this information to the Reading First Director who passed the concerns on to one of the panelists in question as a “Confidential FYI.” This panelist replied:

I suspect that [the Baltimore City Public Schools official’s] assumption is that USDE must be warned that there may be DI infiltrators and that somehow USDE knows how dangerous that can be. You may remember that [the Baltimore City Public Schools official] is a whole language (now called Balanced Literacy) proponent.

The subsequent e-mail response from the Reading First Director suggests his intention to ensure a DI presence on the expert review panel: “Funny that [the Baltimore City Public Schools official] calls *me* to inform that there may be some pro-DI folks on *my* panel!!! Too rich!” The panelist then asked, “Does he know who you are? Past and present?” The Reading First Director replied, “That’s the funniest part – yes! 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!’”

Shortly before this exchange, a Department employee reported to the Reading First Director that the Department had received a question from a member of the media about the panel composition. The response by the Reading First Director suggests that he may indeed have intended to “stack” the expert review panel. The employee stated: “The question is...are we going to ‘stack the panel’ so programs like Reading Recovery don’t get a fair shake[?]” The Reading First Director responded, “‘Stack the panel?’...I have never *heard* of such a thing....[.]”

A few days before the Department publicly announced the panelists it had chosen to serve, one of the Department-nominated panelists contacted the Reading First Director and shared his strong bias against Reading Recovery and his strategy for responding to any State that planned to include Reading Recovery in its application. The Reading First Director responded: “I really like the way you’re viewing/approaching this, and not just because it matches my own approach :-), I swear!” This individual later served as the panel chair for the subpanel that reviewed Wisconsin’s State application and in response to the State’s plans to use Reading Recovery, he included an 11-page negative review of Reading Recovery in his official comments on the application.

Around the same time, Reid Lyon, the former Chief of the Child Development & Behavior Branch at the NICHD, advised the Reading First Director, the Assistant Secretary for OESE, and the Senior Advisor to the Secretary at the time that one of the panelists had been “actively working to undermine the NRP [National Reading Panel] Report and the RF initiatives.” Lyon further stated, “Chances are that other reviewers can trump any bias on her part.” In a written response to all of the people involved, the former Senior Advisor to the Secretary stated, “We can’t un-invite her. Just make sure she is on a panel with one of our barracuda types.”

The statute envisioned that the expert review panel would be balanced with representatives from the Department and three other named organizations. In fact, virtually all of the subpanels had a majority of Department-nominated panelists. Against this backdrop, the actions of the Director and the former Senior Advisor to the Secretary become particularly problematic.

Additionally, the first element identified in GAO’s Standards for Internal Control in the Federal Government as affecting the control environment is “the integrity and ethical values maintained and demonstrated by management and staff.” The apparent intent of the Reading First Director to include and to give a significant role to panelists who reflected his personal preference in reading programs; his specific encouragement to a panelist who held views similar to his on Reading Recovery; and the intention of the former Senior Advisor to the Secretary to control another panelist raise significant questions about the control environment was being managed.

The New Eugenics: From Reading First to the American College of Education

Updated 2:36 PM 4/21/07
Amit Paley has a nice piece in WaPo today of the Reading First law breakers (comments interspersed):

The Justice Department is conducting a probe of a $6 billion reading initiative at the center of President Bush's No Child Left Behind law, another blow to a program besieged by allegations of financial conflicts of interest and cronyism, people familiar with the matter said yesterday.

The disclosure came as a congressional hearing revealed how people implementing the $1 billion-a-year Reading First program made at least $1 million off textbooks and tests toward which the federal government steered states.

"That sounds like a criminal enterprise to me," said Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House education committee, which held a five-hour investigative hearing. "You don't get to override the law," he angrily told a panel of Reading First officials. "But the fact of the matter is that you did."

. . . .

The intricate financial connections between Reading First products and program officials extend beyond issues the committee explored yesterday.

Another researcher, Sharon Vaughn, worked with Kame'enui, Simmons and Good to design Voyager Universal Literacy, a program that Reading First officials urged states to use. Vaughn was director of a center at the University of Texas that was hired to provide states advice on selecting Reading First tests and books.

The publisher of that product, Voyager Expanded Learning, was founded and run by Randy Best, a major Bush campaign contributor, who sold the company in 2005 for more than $350 million. Now Best runs Higher Ed Holdings, a company that develops colleges of education, where former education secretary Roderick R. Paige is a senior adviser and G. Reid Lyon, Bush's former reading adviser, is an executive vice president.

"I'm very disappointed and saddened by the information that was provided at the hearing today," said Lyon, who had been a strong defender of Reading First, which he said had nothing to do with his new job. "The issues appear much more serious than I had been led to understand."

Lyon, of course, is now trying to dissociate himself from an operation that he, Carnine, and Spellings ran. Chris Doherty, in fact, was a protege of the two kingpin ideologues (Carnine and Lyon), and, of course, he is one being thrown under the bus here, just as Brownie was after Katrina. Their code-breaking junk science approach to reading instruction amounts to a socially-engineered and scientized form of brainwashing that turns low-income children into passive drones at an early age. See video clips here of this neo-eugenics system of cognitive decapitation in operation.

Now it seems that Lyon, Carnine, Best, and Paige have even bigger plans at Higher Ed Holdings and the online American College of Education: they want to prepare the next generation of teachers with Masters degrees in Lyon's and Carnine's neo-eugenics teaching methods. Here is a Lyon quote from the introductory ACE Video, which introduced by Rod Paige, by the way:

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 . . .

Obviously, Lyon has decided that his desire to blow up the colleges of education is not practical. The next best thing, then, is to replace those Dewey-spouting, inquiry-based education professors with his own pre-screened canned lectures in how to intellectually sterilize millions of American children every year. If you think I am kidding, I am not. More from WaPo:

Despite the controversy surrounding Reading First's management, the percentage of students in the program who are proficient on fluency tests has risen about 15 percent, Education Department officials said. School districts across the country praise the program.

Yes, very interesting data, indeed. And it was released on April 19, the day before yesterday. Hmm. Also interesting is the fact that the data is from state tests that ED has castigated as unreliable for the past five years. It seems that state tests may be reliable if they can be manipulated to show the original desired outcome for the larger ideological purpose. Most telling, however, is that this data purporting to show that Reading First is working is not compared to any data from any schools not receiving Reading First programs and money. So, compared to what, asks Dick Allington at UT in an Ed Week article: “There are some small gains, yes. But are they larger than gains in non-Reading First schools?” said Richard A. Allington, a professor of education at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. “We don’t know whether improvements are related to the Reading First model or to general improvement trends across all schools.”

More from WaPo:

Members of both parties continue to support the goals of Reading First even as they attack its management. Miller and Senate education committee Chairman Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) joined Republicans yesterday in pledging to tighten restrictions on conflicts of interest in No Child Left Behind.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, who declined to comment yesterday, has said management problems with Reading First "reflect individual mistakes." But Doherty said nearly every aspect of the program was carefully monitored by the department and the White House, where Spelling was Bush's top education adviser.

"This program was always firmly under the watch and control of the highest levels of the government," Doherty said.

This last statement by Doherty is one of the rare truths to be uttered by him yesterday. It should, in fact, be a clear signal to Miller and the other Congressmen that Doherty was getting his marching orders by the generals in the White House. Will Miller go there???

Reading Experts Find Their Voices, Finally

Better late than never, I say. This was put up on the ARN listserv this morning:

This op ed piece will be published in the Albuquerque Journal on Tuesday, October 10.

Every Child Left Ignorant or No More Excuses

Dr. Rick Meyer, PhD Reading Professor, UNM
Dr. Kyle Shanton, Reading Professor, NMSU
Dr. Priscilla Gutierrez, Outreach Specialist
New Mexico School for the Deaf
Dr. Anne Calhoon, Reading Professor, UNM

The recently released Inspector General report regarding Reading First programs (one of the central components of No Child Left Behind, specifically directed at struggling readers) indicates favoritism, mismanagement and widespread corruption are operating at the highest levels of the Department of Education. Every person in this state who has a school aged child, grandchild, niece, nephew, or pays taxes should be outraged.

Reading First was designed to provide money to states to teach reading to students and insisted on a higher level of accountability from schools in return. But instead of providing real support to states, the Reading First program became a sham that reaped huge profits for favored publishing companies and researchers, such as CTB McGraw Hill, and the University of Oregon Center for Teaching and Learning. This last group is largely responsible for the infamous DIBELS test (a five-minute test that demands children say non words such as pag or ret, after which the children may be categorized as 'at risk'). Students are expected to read nonsense words within poorly researched phonics programs in order to get ready for the DIBELS. Children are really learning that reading can be nonsensical. Interestingly, the authors of DIBELS just happen to also sit on the "Expert Review Panel" set up by the Department of Education to approve Reading First grant applications. Little wonder that solid teaching resources or programs that teachers had used previously were now relegated to the "dirtbag" (Reading First director's word) category, in favor of programs that use scripts, carnival clickers, and stop watches. The Expert Panel made sure that accountability became nothing more than test scores that could be manipulated for their own economic and personal advantage.

Our children deserve much more than a program that teaches them reading means barking out words (or nonsense words) as fast as they can. Our children aren't automatons coming down the assembly line beltway. Deep, proficient learning and literacy take time. This requires dialogue between teachers and students, something that is crucial for students learning English. Scripted programs that treat teachers like clerks and children like cogs in a spinning gear are the least desirable instructional option we have, and yet that is what the present structure of No Child Left Behind and Reading First forces upon our schools.

The National Reading Panel's recommendations formed most of the Reading First section of No Child Left Behind. The Panel specifically cautioned against using scripted programs, recognizing their extreme limitations; and cautioned against placing too great an emphasis on phonics, stating phonics must be only a part of a balanced program. The Panel further recognized the critical role the teacher plays in guiding children towards proficient literacy, especially those students from diverse backgrounds. Teachers know their students best, and with ongoing professional development and the appropriate tools, they can teach children to read.

The corrupt officials in Reading First hijacked the Panel's words and transmuted them into an endorsement for programs such as SRA, Direct Instruction, Open Court, and the DIBELS test. All are programs that downplay the importance of the teacher, as well as the diversity of children, and allow little dialogue or deep learning to take place. All are programs that ignore the diversity of our state. Some schools entering their second year of participation in New Mexico's Reading First had to waste precious allocated money to purchase these programs.

New Mexico has one of the highest poverty levels in the entire United States. Everyone here recognizes the critical difference a quality education can make. Without question, our schools are one vehicle for change for the children in this state. And yet billions of dollars have been wasted on ineffective mandated programs that ignore the rich cultural heritage that our students represent and leave them at the lowest levels of thinking and learning, all courtesy of the U.S. Department of Education.

One of the Reading First slogans repeated over and over again was "No Excuses." We couldn't agree more. No more excuses for the lack of oversight with Reading First. No more excuses for wasting precious learning time with nonsense programs. No more excuses for phony baloney "scientifically-based" instruction or accountability. And no more excuses for blindly accepting what we KNOW is counter to best instruction for our students. Demand the best from state and federal legislators for our children. Our children are worth the effort and deserve so much more than what they are getting from the current corrupt Reading First program.

Reading First Finding #4: Breaking Federal Law (again)

If there was any doubt that federal laws were broken by the Reading First mafia, there will be none after looking at the following examples. The heft of the OIG Report can be found in Finding 4, which is broken out into the following categories with evidence supplied to illustrate how each violation of federal law was accomplished:

In the course of answering our objectives for the inspection, we found that the Department, acting through the former Assistant Secretary for OESE, the Reading First Director, and others [Carnine and Lyon]:

• Developed an application package that obscured the requirements of the statute;
• Took action with respect to the expert review panel process that was contrary to the balanced panel composition envisioned by Congress;
  
• Intervened to release an assessment review document without the permission of the entity that contracted for its development;
  
• Intervened to influence a State’s selection of reading programs; and
  

• Intervened to influence reading programs being used by LEAs after the applicationprocess was completed.

Developed an application package that obscured the requirements of the statute. This section details how Susan Neuman, then an Assistant Secretary, aided Doherty in adding some language that was not included in the Law and deleting other language that was in the law. Why? To make sure that non-Oregon mafia (Ore-Mafia) programs like Reading Recovery were cut out of the action:

The Assistant Secretary for OESE planned for the Reading First Guidance to include language that was not in the statute and exclude language that was in the statute. After reviewing a revision to the Department’s draft of the Reading First Guidance, the Assistant Secretary for OESE wrote to the Reading First Director, “under reading first plan. i’d like not to say ‘this must include early intervention and reading remediation materials’ which i think could be read as reading recovery’ [a reading program]. even if it says this in the law, i’d like it taken out.” The subject phrase appears in the law twice (p. 15).

Doherty, under the direction of his handlers, came up with a solution that moved some of the language required by law from the Reading First Criteria into the Reading Guidance section, thus effectively changing the criteria that Congress intended when the Law was enacted:

The approach outlined by the Reading First Director was eventually reflected in the application package that was available to every State on April 2, 2002. As discussed in Finding 3, the Department ultimately included the “bold” language that distorted the requirements of the statute in the Reading First Criteria.

In the Pre-reading notes document, the Reading First Director wrote:

OGC [Office of General Counsel] could likely have concerns with the overall, near-unrelenting aggressiveness of this application...the law does not really require what we are quite literally requiring in our (aggressive) application. Such examples are manifold and OGC may catch some, many or all of them. We have not highlighted them to OGC, of course, and we don’t know how many they’ll focus on. On some issues, we may be able to dodge a little by moving some ‘Meets Standards’ points to the ‘Exemplary,’ but if we do that too much, the result is a less bold application and decreased chances of overall success. We’ll need your muscle [Neuman's?] with OGC on these points across the board (p. 16).

Our next post will examine the the other remaining points under Finding 4.

Carnine and Other Reading First Profiteers

A report from the Senate Education Committee yesterday offers details on some of the Reading First profiteering: Douglas Carnine (more than $800,000), Edward Kame'enui (more than $750,000), Joseph Torgesen (more than $50,000) and Sharon Vaughn (more than $1.2 million).

Here is the text of the AP story carried in the Guardian:

WASHINGTON (AP) - Officials who gave states advice on which teaching materials to buy under a federal reading program had deep financial ties to publishers, according to a congressional report Wednesday.

The report, compiled by Senate Education Committee Chairman Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., details how officials contracted by the government to help run the program were at the same time drawing pay from publishers that benefited from the reading initiative.

Kennedy's report added new detail to a conflict-of-interest investigation by the Education Department's inspector general, John Higgens, who earlier had found that the Reading First Program favored some programs over others and that federal officials and contractors didn't guard against conflicts.

The new report focused on four contractors who headed centers that guided states in choosing reading programs aimed at kindergartners through third graders.

It found the contractors ``had substantial financial ties to publishing companies while simultaneously being responsible for providing technical assistance to states and school districts.'' That damaged the program's integrity and illustrated the need for Congress to head off future conflicts, the report concluded.

The report zeroed in on four people who directed the program's regional Technical Assistance Centers:

-Edward Kame'enui, who headed the western technical assistance center based at the University of Oregon. Between 2002 and 2004, while holding positions in which he was evaluating Reading First assessment programs and giving state education agencies technical assistance, Kame'enui entered into three different contracts with the publisher Pearson/Scott Foresman, the report said.

``Due largely to his contracts with Pearson/Scott Foresman, Dr. Kame'enui's income soared in the period following the implementation of the Reading First program,'' the report said, adding that the majority of his royalties were derived from products used by states and districts in conjunction with Reading First.

Kame'enui, who now works as a commissioner at the Education Department's research arm, earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties from Pearson/Scott Foresman between 2001 and 2006, the report said. He also received tens of thousands of dollars in consulting fees from Voyager, another publisher of products used by states under Reading First from 2000 to 2003.

Scott Foresman also tapped Kame'enui to travel to education conferences and workshops on the company's behalf while he was the western center director, the report said. Kame'enui did not respond to requests for comment.

-Douglas Carnine, who replaced Kame'enui as the western center's director in 2005, when Kame'enui left to take up his federal position. Previously Carnine had other roles related to Reading First.

Even as he headed the western center, Carnine worked with and continues to work with numerous publishers, the report said. He earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties from publishers that did well under Reading First, such as Houghton Mifflin Company from 2002 to 2006.

However, Carnine said in an interview Wednesday that his royalties from Houghton Mifflin and other publishers were for educational programs that had nothing to do with K-3 reading, the focus of Reading First.

-Joseph Torgesen, who directed the eastern regional district at Florida State University from 2003 until the present. Torgesen is co-author of a McGraw Hill reading program that can be used under Reading First. The study found that from 2002 to 2006, Torgesen earned thousands of dollars in royalties and other payments from companies such as McGraw Hill and Pearson and Sopris West, which later was acquired by Cambium Learning.

In one internal e-mail, Torgesen questioned whether he should seek special permission from the department to review the new Scott Foresman curriculum for Maine. ``I had a discussion with some folks in Washington yesterday who rightly pointed out that we might want to think about rewarding Pearson (/Scott Foresman) for significantly strengthening their program,'' Torgesen wrote.

Torgesen, in an interview Wednesday, said a review for the state of Florida had initially identified a Scott Foresman reading program as weak. However, Torgesen said Scott Foresman subsequently made significant improvements to the program, after which education officials in Maine asked Torgesen's center to review the program again.

``That prompted my e-mail to the folks in Washington, who suggested perhaps we might make an exception to re-reviewing Scott Foresman, since they had worked so diligently to improve their program,'' Torgesen said.

-Sharon Vaughn headed the central technical assistance center at the University of Texas-Austin from 2003 to 2005. She received tens of thousands of dollars in royalties from Pearson Education Inc. and ``other income'' from Voyager Expanded learning, two programs used under Reading First.

Vaughn's lawyer, Gaines West, said it was noteworthy that the report did not say that Vaughn was improperly influenced by her relationship with publishers while she was the center's director.

The report concluded by recommending that Congress adopt new restrictions to safeguard against financial conflicts in federal education programs.

``Individuals serving on advisory committees or in the peer review process for the department should be prohibited from maintaining significant financial interests in related educational products or activities,'' the report said.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is scheduled to testify in Congress on Thursday on the Reading First program and problems in the student loan industry.

Spellings said in an Associated Press interview Wednesday that she had not yet thoroughly reviewed Kennedy's report but that any new findings of wrongdoing would be addressed by the department.

She said, however, that it would be impossible to run department programs without relying on some people with ties to the private sector. ``We want and need expertise as we make policy and do this work,'' she said.

Bush's War on Reading in the Limelight

Some educators who are concerned with teaching children how to read, understand and gain the critical thinking skills necessary to become lifelong learners, haven't bought into the Bush Administration's push for Reading First, a phonics-based instruction program that is now the subject of a Congressional investigation at ED.

It may have cost this district in Madison, Wisconsin, (as reported in today's New York Times,) $2 million in funding, but teachers are doing what they, as professionals, believe is best for their students. It appears the press is finally catching on to what most educators have known for years, the Reading First scandal is just another example of Bush & Co. cronysim that has been reported on by Schools Matter and other education watchers. The American public is now finally getting an education on how things at ED work when it comes to "the best interest" of our nation's children.
-------------------------------------------------
Surrounded by five first graders learning to read at Hawthorne Elementary here, Stacey Hodiewicz listened as one boy struggled over a word.

“Pumpkin,” ventured the boy, Parker Kuehni.

“Look at the word,” the teacher suggested. Using a method known as whole language, she prompted him to consider the word’s size. “Is it long enough to be pumpkin?”

Parker looked again. “Pea,” he said, correctly.

Call it the $2 million reading lesson.

By sticking to its teaching approach, that is the amount Madison passed up under Reading First, the Bush administration’s ambitious effort to turn the nation’s poor children into skilled readers by the third grade.

The program, which gives $1 billion a year in grants to states, was supposed to end the so-called reading wars — the battle over the best method of teaching reading — but has instead opened a new and bitter front in the fight.

According to interviews with school officials and a string of federal audits and e-mail messages made public in recent months, federal officials and contractors used the program to pressure schools to adopt approaches that emphasize phonics, focusing on the mechanics of sounding out syllables, and to discard methods drawn from whole language that play down these mechanics and use cues like pictures or context to teach.

Federal officials who ran Reading First maintain that only curriculums including regular, systematic phonics lessons had the backing of “scientifically based reading research” required by the program.

But in a string of blistering reports, the Education Department’s inspector general has found that federal officials may have violated prohibitions in the law against mandating, or even endorsing, specific curriculums. The reports also found that federal officials overlooked conflicts of interest among the contractors that advised states applying for grants, and that in some instances, these contractors wrote reading programs competing for the money, and stood to collect royalties if their programs were chosen.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has said that the problems in Reading First occurred largely before she took over in 2005, and that her office has new guidelines for awarding grants. She declined a request for an interview.

Madison officials say that a year after Wisconsin joined Reading First, in 2004, contractors pressured them to drop their approach, which blends some phonics with whole language in a program called Balanced Literacy. Instead, they gave up the money — about $2 million, according to officials here, who say their program raised reading scores.

In New York City, under pressure from federal officials, school authorities in 2004 dropped their citywide balanced literacy approach for a more structured program stronger in phonics, in 49 low-income schools. At stake was $34 million.

Across the country — in Illinois, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Maine and New Jersey — schools and districts with programs that did not stress phonics were either rejected for grants or pressured to change their methods even though some argued, as Madison did, that their programs met the law’s standard.

“We had data demonstrating that our children were learning at the rate that Reading First was aiming for, and they could not produce a single ounce of data to show the success rates of the program they were proposing,” said Art Rainwater, Madison’s superintendent of schools.
-------------------------------------------------------
Lisa Schiff of San Francisco explains why the Reading First scandal is just symptomatic of a larger education policy that is based on private business and profits.

Other than its very existence, one of the biggest scandals regarding No Child Left Behind (NCLB), our federal education legislation, has been the Reading First program. Reading First is another one of NCLB’s typically myopic efforts to improve educational outcomes. In this instance, the approach has been to promote mechanical solutions to the development of literacy skills for K through 3rd graders through programs based on “evidence-based research” and “scientific data.”

Having a sound basis for using a certain method makes sense, but the absolute reliance on the ability to describe outcomes quantitatively is suspect, since meaningful assessments of literacy skills require more than that. As with some other programs NCLB has introduced, such as supplementary tutoring, a primary purpose of the Reading First component seems to have been to create a fast-track to funnel state dollars used to purchase literacy education materials into the coffers of just a few producers of those same materials. Language such as “scientific” and “evidenced-based” simply served to provide the authoritative cover under which to hide this intention.Many might argue that since NCLB is sufficiently scandalous in the way it reduces education to standardized curricula and tests, narrows the subjects taught and the pedagogical methods employed that there is no need to look further.

While there is a certain truth to this, the flagrant and sustained corruption that occurred with Reading First is particularly important to expose. The impropriety not only clearly breached ethical norms, it serves as a clear example of the privatization goals of NCLB and of the underlying philosophy that profit making is of greater importance than educating our society’s kids.

Slavin Knows a Spellings Lie When He Hears It

(Photo by Doug Mills, New York Times)
Reading First has been pumping a billion dollars a year to the Oregon Mafia for five years now, and the Lyon-Carnine-Good bosses now own the vast majority of the reading curriculums across America. Such sweeping change could not have been accomplished legally, as repeated reports from ED's OIG now show.

The victims of this crime wave are, of course, the children and the taxpayers. Learning to read for children across America, especially the neediest ones, has been turned into a behavioral chain gang that is more about shaping children's minds to mouth meaningless syllables than about instilling a love for books and for learning. This, of course, is a necessary component in the the third-worlding of America, where poor children are trained from an early age to accept any meaningless job they are destined to inherit under the directions of the oligarchs. The world is flatter and flatter, indeed!

Finally, finally, a little light of day is shining under the big slimy rock of Reading First. Yesterday the Cherry Blossom queen bowed, or is that cowered, before a Congressional committee looking into the sleaze, corruption, and law-breaking of Maggie's Reading First managers. She was there to make nice and assure Congress that she had cleaned up the entire mess.

It was left up to Dr. Robert Slavin, owner Success for All, to point out to those present that Spellings's assurances were simply more lies:

After Ms. Spellings left the hearing, Robert Slavin of Johns Hopkins University, whose Success for All reading program was shut out of many states under Reading First, said he did not think the secretary’s promises went far enough. “I haven’t seen the slightest glimmer of even intention to change,” Dr. Slavin said.

Because schools had already chosen their readng curriculums, promises to clean up Reading First now meant little, he said. He compared them to finding eight innings into a baseball game with a score of 23 to 0 that the opposing team had been playing with cork bats.

“Then they say, ‘From now on, we’re using honest bats.’ ” Dr. Slavin said. “I’m sorry, it’s 23 to nothing. You can’t just say, ‘From now on.’ ”

Reading First was required by law to finance only reading programs backed by “scientifically based reading research,” and the Education Department was prohibited from mandating or even endorsing specific curriculums. But the program has been plagued by accusations that states were steered toward a handful of commercial reading programs and testing instruments.

With only two Education Department employees in charge of the vast program, the administration relied largely on private contractors to advise states on their applications for grants, screen products for scientific validity and weigh applications. The inspector general found that several of these contractors wrote reading programs and testing instruments that were competing for money, and that they gave preference to products to which they had ties.

Ms. Spellings has maintained, and said again under questioning Wednesday, that the problems with Reading First occurred before she became education secretary.

She denied accusations from a former political appointee at the department, Michael Petrilli, who said she had essentially run Reading First from her post as domestic policy adviser at the White House. [Petrelli knows something] Mr. Petrilli is now a vice president at a nonprofit education research foundation. Asked about Madison, Wis., where educators gave up $2 million in Reading First money because they would have had to drop a so-called balanced literacy reading program that they said had been successful for the district, Ms. Spellings said she was unfamiliar with the particulars of Madison’s reading program. But she defended Reading First’s ground rules under her predecessor, Rod Paige, saying the program did not exclude specific reading curriculums, but intended only to ensure that they were backed by research.

Reading First Crooks Beware

A salute to Cindy Kupp in the New York Times, which now after the election feels that it is safe to do a story on the unprecedented corruption at ED's Reading First. It was Cindy whose sleuthing helped to get the ball rolling on nailing the crooks at Reading First, some of whom are still employed at ED, and none of which has been indicted yet:

. . . .When the federal government enacted Reading First in 2002, Dr. Cupp thought her company would surely get a slice of the pie. After all, 90 percent of students in the schools that use her kits had learned to read by the end of first grade.

The federal program emphasized phonics — mastering the sounds of letters and letter blends — as opposed to what officials considered the mushiness of whole-language teaching, which emphasizes grasping meaning through good children’s literature. Dr. Cupp’s materials also emphasized phonics — in 60 stories centered on two caped turtles named Jack and Jilly.

That emphasis was on display one day recently in Marie Durrence’s kindergarten at the East Broad Street Elementary School here.

“Jack can see the man play,” Terrica Williams read, pride glinting through her bashful smile.

“Jack can see the man go, go, go,” Kiara Plummer chimed in.

Still, schools that used her materials found themselves frozen out of federal money. Dr. Cupp sought an explanation from a friend at the Georgia Department of Education, where Dr. Cupp was director of reading from 1996 to 1999, and was told, she said, that any school listing her reading program “would not be funded.”

After the federal department repeatedly rejected their grant applications, Georgia officials concluded that “this money is available if you follow the rulebook,” said Dana Tofig, communications director for the Georgia Education Department. Dr. Cupp’s reading program “did not meet the benchmarks it had to meet,” he said, adding that the officials who could explain why no longer worked in the department.

Dr. Cupp points out that Georgia chose big textbook publishers, like Scott Foresman and Macmillan/McGraw-Hill, spurning what she called home-cooked turkey dinners like her reading program. She ended up losing contracts at about a half-dozen schools. Then, she said, by demanding files under Georgia’s open records law, she discovered that a national evaluator had never even looked at her program.

Dr. Cupp’s dealings with the Georgia Education Department are being examined by the federal inspector general. Mary Mitchelson, counsel for that office, said, “We don’t talk about our pending work.” But Dr. Cupp is hoping to get some answers.

Others might have given up when they lost their contract, but Dr. Cupp said she has a strong inclination to resist injustice, rooted in a childhood shadowed by an alcoholic mother. She did not sheepishly accept her fate because she thought she deserved a place.

“We’re not all going to be Wal-Marts and K-Marts,” she said. “I go to the hardware store down the street because I can walk in and say, ‘Help me with this,’ because I know the guy.” So she filed a complaint.

According to Robert E. Slavin, chairman of Success for All, a nonprofit publisher whose phonics-based program is used in 1,200 American schools and who also complained when 200 schools dropped his program in order to get federal money, Dr. Cupp got the ball rolling against Reading First. She “gave us an example and gave us some courage,” Mr. Slavin said.

Last December, federal inspectors came to Savannah, a city graced by sleepy squares and shaded by oak trees dripping with Spanish moss.

Dr. Cupp showed the investigators hundreds of documents she collected over three years that showed links between contractors hired by the federal government to evaluate school reading programs, and the writers of those programs. She also diagrammed these links. Her findings and those of others, including reporters for Education Week, found that consultants hired to help school districts apply for and run Reading First grants sometimes received hefty royalties from the very materials that schools were encouraged to buy.

For example, Dr. Cupp learned that a writer of a Scott Foresman reading textbook selected by schools in Georgia and other states was Edward Kame’enui, a professor on leave from the University of Oregon. Dr. Kame’enui headed a Reading First technical center in Oregon, one of three under contract that help state officials run Reading First programs. Dr. Slavin unearthed financial disclosure forms Dr. Kame’enui filed for 2005 and 2006 showing that he earned between $100,000 and $250,000 a year from Scott Foresman’s parent company, Pearson.

Dr. Kame’enui is now commissioner of the National Center for Special Education Research, an arm of the federal Education Department.

CHAD COLBY, a spokesman at the department, said Dr. Kame’enui’s “role at the department has nothing to do with Reading First anymore, so he’s not giving interviews.”

Dr. Henry L. Johnson, assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, contends that the universe of science-based reading research is small and would include some textbook writers, but Dr. Cupp argues that it is not so small that blatant conflicts were inevitable.

“It’s like saying there are only six heart surgeons in the United States,” she said. Watchdogs like the Center for Education Policy think Reading First money has generally improved reading. Yet the center has also has found ethical problems with the way the program was run.

Dr. Cupp, a Republican by habit, sees an irony in the fact that an administration supposedly skeptical of Washington bureaucracies that dictate to local governments ended up creating one that did precisely that. She thinks the Reading First scandal “will go down as the greatest flimflam in the history of education.” But she said what drove her was the sheer injustice of evaluators rejecting reading kits that she knew succeeded. Her life has been teaching children to read, and “they were attacking my life.”. . .

Ed and Doug and Reid and Roland and Chris and Susan and Ruth--it's never too late to get fitted with that new orange jumpsuit. So just be patient until the new Congress gets sworn in, the one you thought would never happen until after the scam was completed.