The “academic cornerstone” of Bush’s education policy is a flop. But in this case, the failure is even more embarrassing that it appears at first glance.
President Bush’s $1 billion a year initiative to teach reading to low-income children has not helped improve their reading comprehension, according to a Department of Education report released on Thursday.
The program, known as Reading First, drew on some of Mr. Bush’s educational experiences as Texas governor, and at his insistence Congress included it in the federal No Child Left Behind legislation that passed by bipartisan majorities in 2001. It has been a subject of dispute almost ever since, however, with the Bush administration and some state officials characterizing the program as beneficial for young students, and Congressional Democrats and federal investigators criticizing conflict of interest among its top advisers.
“Reading First did not improve students’ reading comprehension,” concluded the report, which was mandated by Congress and carried out by the Department of Education’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences. “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.”
Noting that education reform efforts routinely fall short of expectations, Kevin noted, “Maybe RF was poorly implemented. Maybe it just happened to be a bad idea. But it’s astonishing how many efforts to improve K-12 instruction turn out not to work. Even the ones that do seem to work usually turn out to fail if you just wait a few years or try to scale them up beyond pilot size. This is one of the reasons I don’t blog much about education policy even though it’s an interesting subject. For all the sturm and drang, in the end nothing really seems to matter. After a hundred years of more-or-less rigorous pedagogical research, we still don’t know how to teach kids any better than we used to.”
Fair enough. Reform efforts really are notoriously difficult, and when one falls short, few are surprised.
But in the case of “Reading First,” the problems go a little deeper than just an unsuccessful reading program.
I’ve been following “Reading First,” off and on, for a while now, and watching the billions of dollars the Bush administration has invested in the program nationwide.
And while it’s disappointing when an education reform effort flops, it’s worth keeping in mind precisely how “Reading First” flopped. In this case, true to form, the Bush administration ran the program with its trademark incompetence and ineptitude.
Top Education Department officials, including former Secretary Rod Paige, allowed specialists to improperly encourage state and local officials to spend billions of dollars in federal grant money with a small group of companies, government investigators have concluded.
In educating state and local officials about the department’s Reading First grant program, officials loaded expert panels with speakers who overwhelmingly preferred products from a handful of educational companies, according to a report released yesterday by the Education Department’s inspector general.
As ABC’s Justin Rood explained a while back, the Department of Education is prohibited from interfering with curriculum decisions by state and local education officials. But when it came to Reading First, Bush’s political appointees would pick favored companies, then push state and local education officials to buy their products and services.
And wouldn’t you know it, the companies favored by the administration just happened to be headed by Bush donors.
The IG found that the training programs set up by the Department to educate states about the Reading First program violated the prohibition against controlling individual school curricula by promoting specific reading materials and instructions to the financial of benefit companies — such as McGraw Hill and Voyager — headed by top Bush administration donors. The IG also found that the Department failed to adequately assess “issues of bias and objectivity” in approving technical assistance providers.
In response to the report, CREW’s Executive Director Melanie Sloan said: “It is becoming increasingly clear that the Bush administration has been sacrificing the education of children to financially benefit a select group of loyalists and donors. CREW has filed suit to force the Department of Education to come clean about the extent to which cronyism and corruption have permeated the Reading First panels, potentially depriving our nation’s highest risk children of the best possible reading materials.”
For example, McGraw-Hill’s Chairman and CEO, Harold McGraw III, and its Chairman Emeritus, Harold McGraw Jr., contributed a total of over $23,000 to the Republican National Committee and to President Bush’s campaigns between 1999 and 2006. Sure enough, the company was pushed during the Education Secretary’s “Readership Language Academies.”
In fact, these official seminars for state and local education officials didn’t just promote favored companies, they also cracked down on companies the Bush gang disapproved of.
In one particularly amusing example, Reading First’s then-director Chris Doherty wrote an email to a staff member, urging the aide to come down hard on a company he didn’t support. “They are trying to crash our party and we need to beat the (expletive deleted) out of them in front of all the other would-be party crashers who are standing on the front lawn waiting to see how we welcome these dirtbags,” Doherty wrote.
Sen. Ted Kennedy, chairman of the Senate’s education committee, said, “The Bush administration has put cronyism first and the reading skills of our children last, and this report shows the disturbing consequences.”
Raise your hand if you’re surprised.