Following up on an issue we first discussed six months ago, [tag]Reading First[/tag] is not just another grant program in the [tag]Department of Education[/tag]. According to the cabinet agency’s website, it is “the academic cornerstone of the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act.” Reading First, the Department of Education has argued “is a prime example of the No Child Left Behind law’s emphasis on programs and teaching methods that have been proven to work.”
As the “academic cornerstone” of its education policy, the administration has been funding the reading program with some enthusiasm. Over the last four years, about 1,500 school districts have received $4.8 billion in Reading First grants.
All of this matters because, as it turns out, the Bush administration ran the program the same way it does practically everything — with 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, 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 favored companies 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 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.
By the way, the same director told a Senate committee his program did not give certain companies preferential treatment. He appears to have been lying.
It’s quite an administration, isn’t it? Are there any departments that haven’t been corrupted over the last six years?