Key Initiative Of 'No Child' Under Federal Investigation

Officials Profited From Reading First Program

By Amit R. Paley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 21, 2007; A01

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 Education Department's inspector general, John P. Higgins Jr., said he has made several referrals to the Justice Department about the five-year-old program, which provides grants to improve reading for children in kindergarten through third grade.

Higgins declined to offer more specifics, but Christopher J. Doherty, former director of Reading First, said in an interview that he was questioned by Justice officials in November. The civil division of the U.S. attorney's office for the District, which can bring criminal charges, is reviewing the matter.

Doherty, one of the two Education Department employees who oversaw the initiative, acknowledged yesterday that his wife had worked for a decade as a paid consultant for a reading program, Direct Instruction, that investigators said he improperly tried to force schools to use. He repeatedly failed to disclose the conflict on financial disclosure forms.

"I'm very proud of this program and my role in this program," Doherty said in the interview. "I think it's been implemented in accordance with the law."

The management of Reading First has come under attacks from members of both parties. Federal investigators say program officials improperly forced states to use certain tests and textbooks created by those officials.

One official, Roland H. Good III, said his company made $1.3 million off a reading test, known as DIBELS, that was endorsed by a Reading First evaluation panel he sat on. Good, who owns half the company, Dynamic Measurement Group, told the committee that he donated royalties from the product to the University of Oregon, where he is an associate professor.

Two former University of Oregon researchers on the panel, Edward J. Kame'enui and Deborah C. Simmons, said they received about $150,000 in royalties last year for a program that is now packaged with DIBELS. They testified that they received smaller royalties in previous years for the program, Scott Foresman Early Reading Intervention, and did not know it was being sold with DIBELS.

Members of the panel said they recused themselves from voting on their own products but did assess their competitors. Of 24 tests approved by the committee, seven were tied to members of the panel.

"I regret the perception of conflicts of interest," said Kame'enui, former chairman of the committee, who now works at the department as commissioner of the National Center for Special Education Research. "But there was no real conflict of interest being engaged in."

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."

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.

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.

Staff writer Carol D. Leonnig contributed to this report.

101 WAYS TO MASSACRE STUDENTS

Related

Key 'No Child' Initiative Probed
Reading First officials profited off materials toward which federal government steered states.
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April 19, 2007

By Carolyn Baker

Once again, a horrific eruption of violence in the United States has been turned into a National Enquirer “blood and circuses” spectacle on every television network in the nation. Curiously, grotesque and ghastly as the carnage is, it seems that Americans are not impacted by bloodbaths until they occur in their own back yards. Juan Cole said it best yesterday when he stated, “the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech should give us a baseline for what the Iraqis are actually living through. They have two Virginia Tech-style attacks every single day”.

We seem incapable of coming to terms with violence: Either we distance ourselves from it as “something happening over there” or we voyeuristically wallow in it 24/7 with grisly images of a massacre or the incessant repetition of a video tape made by a perpetrator exuding psychotic rage from every pore. In neither case does America appear to be capable of asking the deeper, disturbing questions in relation to such incidents, but obsessively leaps to “the healing” which Gary Corseri so brilliantly slammed in his piece earlier this week, “Blacksburg: Let The Healing Not Begin.”

As I watched some of the coverage of the Virginia Tech incident this past week, I could not help but be reminded of another massacre that occurred thirty-seven years ago next month at Kent State University. On that day I was being pepper gassed as I marched in solidarity at Michigan State with my fallen comrades at Kent State who were massacred by a government which at that very moment was murdering thousands of Cambodians, dropping bombs it swore it wasn’t dropping and lying through its teeth to the American people in the throes of the Vietnam War. Today I teach with a colleague who on May 4, 1970 took a stray bullet at Kent State and became permanently disabled as a result.

But while Kent State and Virginia Tech are venues of physical assault on students, almost no one is aware of the myriad levels on which, in other venues and without the spilling of blood, students are being massacred. Another article this past week which escaped the notice of many but riveted my attention was Danny Schechter’s “A Student Crisis”. Writing, Schechter says, in the spirit of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly”, he reminds us of “the way student loans have become a noose around the necks of a whole generation of students making our colleges and universities likely sets for the next edition of one of those crime scene shows.” Furthermore, in recent weeks the corruption around student loans involving kickbacks, gifts, trips, and other perks to college and university officials involved in the lending process has been exposed and appears to be just the tip of the iceberg. California Congressman, George Miller, compares the corruption and abuse in the student loan industry to that of Halliburton. Moreover, Miller’s investigations have also revealed that as well as being deeply mired in corruption, the industry is also involved in datamining of students’ personal records, ostensibly to determine their eligibility for loans.

Meanwhile says Schecter:

Sallie Mae, the nation’s largest student loan company, announced yesterday that it would be bought by a group of private investors in a $25 billion deal that could reduce public scrutiny of the lender at a time when the student loan industry is under siege.

The enormous deal underscores the potential for profit that Wall Street sees in the $85 billion-a-year student loan industry, even as Congress considers slashing billions of dollars in federal loan subsidies and an expanding nationwide probe reveals fresh conflicts of interest in the student lending world.”

Schechter knows about these things as a result of his splendid documentary “In Debt We Trust” which illumines not only the student loan debacle but the seduction of financially unsophisticated college freshmen into the black hole of credit card debt—an average of $20,000 per college graduate.

To fully comprehend the economic plight of today’s college student/graduate, I strongly recommend Anya Kamenetz’s superb book Generation Debt and her article “Greed Aid” which was part of her 2004 “Generation Debt” series of articles in Village Voice. Kamenetz analyzes the student loan/debt issue and reveals the lifelong misery that it is inflicting on millions of students. Tragically, and God forbid, the seeds sown in this present economic assault on students could eventually produce the harvest of another literal massacre on some college or university campus somewhere in the future by some troubled graduate, buried in mid-life under a crushing mountain of debt.

But the economic warfare being waged on students is only one aspect of the massacre. Even more brutal, yet silent and seemingly benign, is the massacre of minds. Supposedly, students attend college and universities to get an education, and supposedly, even if they attend a community college, they are required to show up with basic skills. Yet anyone who has been teaching college students for the past twenty years knows that only a tiny segment of incoming freshmen are capable of writing an English sentence, and even more frightening is the reality that non-English speakers from other countries are often capable of doing so while students educated in the U.S. aren’t. Sadly, I’ve discovered that overall, college students do not like to read and have trouble concentrating on textbook or other reading assignments. It is not uncommon for them to purchase $150 textbooks and almost never open them. Faculty frequently report that they are only able to lecture 15 or 20 minutes and then must incorporate a Power Point presentation or utilize video or DVD material in order not to lose the attention of their students. In other words, the present generation of high school graduates often finds concepts without the dazzle of special effects, elusive and monotonous.

Increasingly, children in public schools are experiencing horrific levels of violence on a daily basis as they are forced to deal with physical or verbal bullying from other students and ineffectual school administrations with no funds to put bullies and their parents in programs that would adequately address the issue. Periodically, protracted bullying erupts in a Columbine or a Virginia Tech incident, perpetrated either by the bully or one of his victims. Then everyone rushes to “heal and move on”, never willing to explore the deeper roots of the violence.

Overwhelmingly, as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which Greg Palast has so appropriately named “No Child’s Behind Left”, students coming to college from a public school seem to excel in test-taking, but have virtually no critical thinking skills. In my experience, I find that students enjoy critically thinking once they have learned the skill, but they require training for it because it is a foreign concept.

NCLB is a gargantuan assault not only on the minds of public school and college students, but on the entire society. It is, in my opinion, the principal reason, besides skillfully-cultivated fear, that Americans could be lied into the Iraq War. When Colin Powell made his bogus case for war in front of the United Nations in 2003, a society of critical thinkers would have raised their eyebrows and asked more probing questions. As it was, a British news channel exposed his plagiarism of a graduate student’s essay as a fundamental piece of his presentation. (Students serve many purposes for the ruling elite, do they not?) When during that presentation Powell held up a vial of white powder, touting it as anthrax, critically thinking Americans should not have turned as white as the powder with fear, but rather demanded proof that the vial was not filled with baking soda. When Condoleeza Rice threatened that if we did not invade Iraq, a mushroom cloud would hang over America because Iraq was purportedly in the process of manufacturing a nuclear bomb, a country of critical thinkers would have unambiguously and boisterously insisted on proof beyond the whining, photo-op assertions of the former Chevron board member. But as one of my students naively asked later, “If it wasn’t true, why did they have it on CNN?”

My answer: Because CNN is corporate media whose job it is to act as stenographers for the regime and “sell” its agenda to a nation of citizens who are incapable of thinking analytically, and in 2003, the scam was successful beyond the wildest dreams of the necons who devised it.

Naturally, in my field I am constantly reminded of how trivial and irrelevant America’s public education system has rendered the study of history. Most college students have no sense of it and report enduring the mind-numbing boredom of high school history classes either by ditching, text-messaging, or falling asleep. Increasingly, as with art and music programs, funding for history is being slashed both in high schools and colleges and increased for engineering and computer technology programs.

Some years ago I heard John Judge remark that “a people who have no knowledge of their history are easily manipulated and dominated.” Deny students the ability to read, write, critically think, and study history, and you have a nation of sycophants who ask no questions and comply with virtually any directive in the name of patriotism or national security as they are almost certain to do when they are sold the regime’s propaganda regarding the National I.D. Act and the U.S. government’s plan to incorporate its provisions in 2009. After all, who among them is willing to have the privilege of obtaining or renewing a drivers license, opening a bank account, or boarding a plane denied?

So what is the destiny of this generation of students? Where will they end up besides unfathomably in debt? Sadly, they are facing a future hammered by global warming, global energy depletion, and global economic meltdown. They will go forth from the halls of academia, and if they are not well-connected, they will take the jobs they can get. They will graduate into a world of outsourced American jobs which will force them to accept mind and soul-numbing positions with insufficient pay, often with few or no benefits. Those in tech fields may fare better than those in other professions, I wouldn’t be willing to bet that in another decade they will be delirious with a sense of job satisfaction.

Many, wide-eyed with idealism, will enter the teaching profession, determined to teach differently than they were taught, but according to statistics from 2005, half of the teachers surveyed plan to be out of the profession by 2010. These hopeful education majors will vow to give students a genuine education, not just prepare pupils for NCLB tests, but unless they are teaching in private schools where NCLB is not incorporated and which also pay less than public schools, they will be discouraged and demoralized within less than a decade. In public schools they will soon discover that whether they like NCLB or not, their salaries will be tied to the test scores they produce, in which case, why not “teach to the test” instead of giving students an education? They may learn to live with a system that makes authentic teaching virtually impossible, in which case, they will become robotic moving parts in a nationwide dumbing-down mechanism, or choosing not to live with it, they will abandon the career for which they have trained in favor of remaining true to their calling as educators.

Increasingly, trade and tech schools will be the choice of many high school graduates, and a college education will ultimately become untenable financially for the middle-class student and impractical in terms of its value in securing lucrative employment. As the current housing bubble worsens and impacts the credit industry and interest rates, and as the Bush administration endeavors to eliminate the Mortgage Tax Credit, owning one’s home will not be in the future of many college graduates. And given the new bankruptcy laws of 2005, declaring bankruptcy in the face of grinding debt will not be an option, and this generation of graduates will never, ever get ahead financially.

So on the one hand, the carnage at Virginia Tech is equivalent to what innocent Iraqis and most U.S. combat troops experience at least twice a week, and therefore, brings home to our own soil the horrors of mass violence. But at the same time if we are among those critically thinking Americans to whom I alluded above, then we must also consider the full spectrum of assault being waged on today’s students which encompasses high schools, colleges, and universities across America, and we must consider the consequences of those assaults in terms of the misery, despair, and even violence that they are certain to evoke in the coming years.

In recent months I have been pleased to hear of a resurgence of chapters of SDS (Students For A Democratic Society) at U.S. colleges and universities. As well as protesting the Iraq War, some have been instrumental in organizing for wage increases and benefits for campus workers. Hopefully, they will also begin or have already begun to organize against the economic warfare being waged on students by the debt industry.

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Dozens in GOP Turn Against Bush's Prized 'No Child' Act

By Jonathan Weisman and Amit R. Paley

Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, March 15, 2007; A01

More than 50 GOP members of the House and Senate -- including the House's second-ranking Republican -- will introduce legislation today that could severely undercut President Bush's signature domestic achievement, the No Child Left Behind Act, by allowing states to opt out of its testing mandates.

For a White House fighting off attacks on its war policy and dealing with a burgeoning scandal at the Justice Department, the GOP dissidents' move is a fresh blow on a new front. Among the co-sponsors of the legislation are House Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), a key supporter of the measure in 2001, and John Cornyn (R-Tex.), Bush's most reliable defender in the Senate. Rep. Eric Cantor (Va.), the House GOP's chief deputy whip and a supporter in 2001, has also signed on.

Burson Snyder, a spokesman for Blunt, said that after several meetings with school administrators and teachers in southwest Missouri, the House Republican leader turned against the measure he helped pass. Blunt was convinced that the burdens and red tape of the No Child Left Behind Act are unacceptably onerous, Snyder said.

Some Republicans said yesterday that a backlash against the law was inevitable. Many voters in affluent suburban and exurban districts -- GOP strongholds -- think their schools have been adversely affected by the law. Once-innovative public schools have increasingly become captive to federal testing mandates, jettisoning education programs not covered by those tests, siphoning funds from programs for the talented and gifted, and discouraging creativity, critics say.

To be sure, key lawmakers would like to reauthorize the law this year. Ranking Republicans on the House and Senate education committees are pushing for a renewal. And key Democrats, including Rep. George Miller (Calif.) and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.), the chairmen of the House and Senate committees responsible for drafting an updated No Child Left Behind Act, are strong supporters, although they want large increases in funding and more emphasis on teacher training and development.

Still, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), author of the new House bill, said the number of Republicans already backing the new measure exceeds the 41 House Republicans and Democrats who voted against the original legislation in 2001. Of the House bill's co-sponsors, at least eight voted for the president's plan six years ago.

"President Bush and I just see education fundamentally differently," said Hoekstra, a longtime opponent of the law. "The president believes in empowering bureaucrats in Washington, and I believe in local and parental control."

As Congress considers reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act, the GOP rebellion could grow, conceded Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon (Calif.), the ranking Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee and a key ally of the president on the issue. "It was a struggle getting it passed last time. It'll be even more of a struggle this time," he said.

Under Hoekstra's bill, any state could essentially opt out of No Child Left Behind after one of two actions. A state could hold a referendum, or two of three elected entities -- the governor, the legislature and the state's highest elected education official -- could decide that the state would no longer abide by the strict rules on testing and the curriculum.

The Senate bill is slightly less permissive, but it would allow a state to negotiate a "charter" with the federal government to get away from the law's mandates.

In both cases, the states that opt out would still be eligible for federal funding, but those states could exempt any education program but special education from No Child Left Behind strictures.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) said that advocates do not intend to repeal the No Child Left Behind Act. Instead, they want to give states more flexibility to meet the president's goals of education achievement, he said. As a House member in 2001, DeMint opposed No Child Left Behind when it first came to a vote, but he voted for it on final passage.

"So many people are frustrated with the shackles of No Child Left Behind," DeMint said. "I don't think anyone argues with measuring what we're doing, but the fact is, even the education community . . . sees us just testing, testing, testing, and reshaping the curriculum so we look good."

Parent unrest in places such as Scarsdale, N.Y., and parts of suburban Michigan could affect members of Congress. Connecticut has sued the government over the law, while legislatures in Virginia, Colorado and heavily Republican Utah have moved to supersede it.

Republican lawmakers involved in crafting the new legislation say Education Secretary Margaret Spellings and other administration officials have moved in recent days to tamp down dissent within the GOP. Since January, Spellings has met or spoken with about 40 Republican lawmakers on the issue, said Katherine McLane, the Education Department's press secretary.

"We've made a lot of progress in the past five years in serving the children who have traditionally been underserved in our education system," McLane said. "Now is not the time to roll back the clock on those children."

But so far, the administration's efforts have borne little fruit, Republican critics said.

"Republicans voted for No Child Left Behind holding their noses," said Michael J. Petrilli, an Education Department official during Bush's first term who is now a critic of the law. "But now with the president so politically weak, conservatives can vote their conscience."

Report Criticizes Failure to Police Bias in Federal Reading First Program

February 23, 2007

The U.S. Department of Education “did not adequately assess issues of bias and lack of objectivity” during the early days of the Reading First program, according to a report issued on Thursday by the department’s inspector general.

The report is the latest in a series of critical accounts of Reading First, a $900-million-per-year component of the No Child Left Behind Act (The Chronicle, February 2). The Reading First program, which provides grants to improve reading instruction in low-income schools in kindergarten through the third grade, places more restrictions on local districts than did many previous federal education programs. States and districts may spend their Reading First grants only on textbooks and other products that are “in alignment with” five major elements of effective reading instruction that were identified in a 2000 report issued by the National Reading Panel, a federally financed committee of scholars.

According to Reading First’s admirers, those prescriptive rules have been crucial to the program’s success. Critics, however, have complained that the department and its contractors have sometimes crossed the line by appearing to require the use of specific commercial products, in violation of the Department of Education Organization Act, which forbids federal officials to exercise “direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum or program of instruction of any school or school system.”

The new report, for example, declares that a Reading First handbook distributed to state officials in late 2002 “appeared to promote” an assessment tool known as the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, or Dibels, which was created by a pair of scholars at the University of Oregon. A commercial version of Dibels, which is sold by Sopris-West, a Colorado company, has been widely purchased under Reading First. (A noncommercial version may also be downloaded free from the scholars’ Web site.)

The new report also notes that several scholars affiliated with Reading First’s three “technical-assistance centers” — which are located at Florida State University, the University of Texas, and the University of Oregon — had simultaneous relationships as authors or consultants for commercial publishers whose products have been purchased under Reading First.

The report does not name the scholars, and it does not allege that they actually pressured states to purchase their own products. The report declares, however, that the department should have taken those superficial conflicts of interest more seriously. “Without an adequate assessment of bias and lack of objectivity for individuals proposed to perform department contract work,” the report reads, “the department could be placed in a situation where the public could reasonably question and perhaps discount or dismiss the work performed simply because of the existence of a potential bias.”

Within the next several weeks, the inspector general is expected to release a more detailed report about the Reading First technical-assistance centers, which were created under a federal contract with the New Hampshire-based RMC Research Corporation. The Government Accountability Office is also expected soon to release an investigative report on the administration of Reading First.

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