Reading First program could be on its last legs

This from USA Today, AP file photo 2004:

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

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

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

But many educators say the money — about $17.7 million per state in 2007 — was a godsend, allowing them to train teachers in scientifically based reading methods, buy quality supplies and help an estimated 1.8 million children learn to read...

Senate Panel Also Votes to Kill Funds for 'Reading First'

From Ed Week:

A Senate Appropriations subcommittee voted [earlier this week] to eliminate all funding for the Reading First program, as part of a fiscal 2009 spending bill that would provide modest increases for other education programs. Last week, a House Appropriations subcommittee also approved a fiscal 2009 spending measure that would scrap funding for the controversial reading program, which was authorized as part of the No Child Left Behind Act...

The Department of Education has just released an analysis of state test-score data showing that a majority of states have seen gains in reading fluency and comprehension in Reading First schools. ("Keep ‘Reading First’ Funds, Advisory Group Urges Congress", June 24, 2008.) ...

Dems Move to Kill Reading First

Typical partisan wrong-headedness: House panel uses bad study to justify killing a good program tainted by Bush Administration schennagans - throws baby out with the bath water.

This from EducationWeek:

House Panel Would Kill ‘Reading First’ Funding

The controversial federal Reading First program would be eliminated under a fiscal 2009 spending measure approved unanimously today by a House Appropriations subcommittee.

In explaining the decision to zero out the program, Rep. David R. Obey, D-Wis., the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, cited the results of a preliminary federal evaluation of Reading First, released May 1, which found that the program has had no impact on students’ reading comprehension.

Reading First “has been plagued with mismanagement, conflicts of interest, and cronyism, as documented by the inspector general,” Rep. Obey said, referring to a series of reports by the U.S. Department of Education’s watchdog that suggested conflicts of interest had occurred among officials and contractors who helped implement the program in its early years.

“Moreover, a scientifically rigorous study released by the Department of Education found that the program has no discernible impact on student reading performance,” Rep. Obey, who is also the chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that handles education funding, said in reference to the evaluation by the Institute of Education Sciences, an arm of the department....

Literacy Program Shows Success in Kentucky

LEXINGTON, Ky. (May 30, 2008) − A recent report issued by the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences stated that the Reading First national literacy program was not having a statistically significant impact on student reading achievement.
However, the Collaborative Center for Literacy Development (CCLD), which is housed in the University of Kentucky College of Education, reports that the opposite is true in Kentucky.

Research conducted by the CCLD shows that in the 72 schools across the Commonwealth of Kentucky that are participating in the Reading First program, reading growth has been seen across the board. In the first four years of the five-year program, the percentage of students in kindergarten through third grades proficient in reading has increased 30.1 percent to 71.7 percent (from 2004 to 2007). Also, in these schools, the achievement gap between white students and other racial groups is narrowing. For example, Caucasian students have improved 14.7 percent while African-American students have improved 28.8 percent.

Why has the program shown success in Kentucky and not in the national sample surveyed by the Institute of Education Sciences? Kentucky is using a comprehensive and customized approach to the Reading First program said CCLD Executive Director Susan Cantrell.

"Rather than using one standard package of materials statewide, Kentucky's proposal for the Reading First grant is based on meeting the needs of individual schools and students," Cantrell said. "The Kentucky program is grounded more in professional development and teacher learning than in just implementing scripted packaged programs.

"Teachers implementing Reading First in Kentucky are addressing comprehension, word recognition, vocabulary and fluency in a comprehensive way with an appropriate focus in each of those areas," Cantrell said. “Our research is telling us that a comprehensive approach which includes high-quality classroom instruction and effective intervention programs makes a positive difference in young children’s reading achievement."

Kentucky has a number of other successful literacy intervention programs that Reading First is building on. Other statewide initiatives involving CCLD include the Read to Achieve program and the Kentucky Reading Project (KRP). Read to Achieve, funded through the Kentucky General Assembly and administered by the Kentucky Department of Education, operates in 311 elementary schools and reaches more than 10,000 students. It provides reading intervention services for primary-aged students who are having difficulty with reading, and the majority of students read at or above grade level after participating in the program. KRP, operated by CCLD, has provided intensive training in reading instruction to more than 3,000 of Kentucky’s teachers over the past nine years, improving classroom instruction so that the need for intervention is reduced.

“It is essential that we keep these early literacy programs going so that all children have access to good instruction that meets their needs," Cantrell said.

Reading First was established by the national No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 to help all children read at or above grade level by the end of third grade. In 2009, a final report will be issued providing an additional year of data that will examine the impact of scientifically based reading instruction on improvements in reading comprehension.

The CCLD, which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, is a collaboration between Kentucky’s eight state universities and focuses on improving literacy instruction in early childhood through adulthood with numerous professional development and research initiatives. For more information, visit www.kentuckyliteracy.org.

SOURCE: UK News

Cronyism First Yields Poor Results

"Well, a Federal study released today shows that President Bush's $1 billion a year Reading First program has done nothing to increase the reading skills of young students. However, his Oil Company First program -- going like gangbusters."

That was Jay Leno's joke following last week's report that President Bush's $1 billion a year initiative to teach reading to low-income children has not helped improve their reading comprehension.

Funny.

Sam Dillon writes in the New York Times:

“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.”

There's nothing I enjoy quite so much as some good old fashioned Bush bashing. I have trouble finding a whole lot this administration has gotten right.But in the case of Reading First, sober reflection causes me to hold my fire. This is a program President Bush almost got right. But it was also a program badly damaged by unethical practices (and consequently needy children were damaged).

Where did it all go wrong? Just follow the money.

In October 2006, Michael Grunwald wrote in The Washington Post, "an accumulating mound of evidence" suggested "that Reading First has had little to do with science or rigor. Instead, the billions have gone to what is effectively a pilot project for untested programs with friends in high places.

"Department officials and a small group of influential contractors have strong-armed states and local districts into adopting a small group of unproved textbooks and reading programs with almost no peer-reviewed research behind them. The commercial interests behind those textbooks and programs have paid royalties and consulting fees to the key Reading First contractors, who also served as consultants for states seeking grants and chaired the panels approving the grants. Both the
architect of Reading First and former education secretary Roderick R. Paige have gone to work for the owner of one of those programs, who is also a top Bush fundraiser.

On Sept. 22, the department's inspector general released a report exposing some of Reading First's favoritism and mismanagement. The highlights were internal e-mails from then-program director Chris Doherty, vowing to deny funding to programs that weren't part of the department's in-crowd:

'They are trying to crash our party and we need to beat the [expletive] 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.'

Edward M. Kennedy, Chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, released the following statement in response to the report on the Reading First program.

"The Bush Administration has put cronyism first and the reading skills of our children last and this report shows the disturbing consequences. Instead of awarding scarce education dollars to reading programs that make a difference for our children, the Administration chose to reward its friends instead. I call on the Administration to put children first by putting politics aside and enlisting high-quality programs in the important task of helping school children learn to read."

I can certainly sympathize with anyone who wanted to wash their hands of the program, NCLB, Spellings and everything else that goes with it.

However, this is a moment to stop - and think about the kids. I say this for two reasons: First, putting high quality teachers in front of needy children is going to be the solution to closing the achievement gap. We need to be persistent and patient. Second, the media has reported the report's conclusions and printed the headlines without much examination. This study was neither randomly constructed nor designed to draw the conclusions it made.

Reading guru Reid Lyon analyzes the limitations of the Reading First study, which found no improvement in reading scores for high-need students. The sample excluded the neediest schools, which presumably would be most affected.

Lyon says: . . . many non-Reading First schools were implementing the same programs and professional development opportunities as the Reading First schools. This impact evaluation is not a true experiment which could have certainly been done given the tremendous financial resources allocated for the evaluation.

As Tim Shanahan, who served on the study's Technical Work Group has pointed out, the comparisons made were not Reading First with non-Reading First schools, but Reading First with less-Reading First schools.Lyon also points out that Reading First schools are spending less than an hour a day on reading instruction, much less than the program calls for, and are devoting more time to comprehension than to phonics.

D-Ed Reckoning has adds:

"Methodological deficiencies notwithstanding, I'm not sure why anyone is surprised that the the interim Reading First Study seems to be showing null results."

NewsHour interviewed Douglas Christensen, commissioner of the Nebraska Department of Education, and Michele Goady, director of the Reading First program for the Maryland Department of Education last week.

Here's the transcript:

JUDY WOODRUFF: Now, a multibillion-dollar reading program for struggling students comes under fire. Jeffrey Brown has the story.

JEFFREY BROWN: The idea of the Reading First program is to improve elementary school reading, particularly for low-income children. And it now reaches about 1.5 million students in 5,200 schools nationwide.

The program requires students to spend additional time each day on a set plan emphasizing several skills, including phonics.

In 2001, President Bush described it as a cornerstone of the federal No Child Left Behind effort.

President of the United States: We`re making great progress on what I`ve called a Reading First initiative. The budget I submitted triples the amount of money to help fight illiteracy in schools.

It says that, if a state wants, you can access the federal money. But you develop a K-2 diagnostic tool to make sure kindergarten teachers through second-grade teachers have got the ability to discern which children need extra help.

It means you`ve got to develop a curriculum that works. By the way, phonics needs to be a part of our curriculum in America.

JEFFREY BROWN: But is it working? A new study from the Department of Education found the program has had no measurable effect on students` reading comprehension.

The program has also been under fire over concerns about conflicts of interest in the awarding of contracts. As a result, Congress has reduced its annual budget.

We get two views now. Douglas Christensen, commissioner of the Nebraska Department of Education, and Michele Goady, director of the Reading First program for the Maryland Department of Education.

Well, Ms. Goady, starting with you, first, help us understand this program. How is it different from traditional means of teaching reading?

MICHELE GOADY, Maryland State Department of Education: Well, Reading First is not just a program, but it was a federal initiative to provide funds to the states, to provide an intensive reading program for children who were traditionally struggling in reading.

So we selected both school systems and schools that traditionally needed a lot of support in reading. We went in and provide a comprehensive reading program.

So it includes providing support for teachers through what we call coaching, or mentoring, being with teachers, supervised support. It does include a clear, systematic instruction.

And that instruction would include the full complement of a reading program, a core reading program we want to call it, provide services for children that continue to have problems in reading. And we would call that supplemental and intervention services.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, Mr. Christensen, what`s wrong with that? Why do you think it`s been ineffective?

DOUGLAS CHRISTENSEN, Commissioner, Nebraska Department of Education: Well, I think from the beginning it`s been a policy disaster, in the fact that there was no evidence to support heading down this road in the first place.

It seems to me that the reading panel that was convened prior to this made it very clear that there were multiple methods of reading instruction that were supported by evidence and there was no one particular methodology that came out above the rest.

And yet, Reading First came out to look at direct instruction as just about the only way in which phonemic awareness and phonics and those, structure of language, comprehension, could be taught.

And I think, secondly, it fails from the standpoint of any notion that you can transform practice from such a remote place from the classroom as Washington, D.C.

Geographically, certainly the distance is huge, but from the standpoint of practice, you couldn`t get any more -- any further away from the classroom than you do there.

And then, secondly, or third, the idea that you can prescribe a practice and that you can create compliance conditions and, therefore, teachers will simply become perfect or best teachers they can possibly be, that notion has never been established and is offensive to me as an educator that we would try to be that prescriptive about a program.

JEFFREY BROWN: Let me get a response from Ms. Goady. Have you found specific results that you can -- positive results that you feel you can point to?

MICHELE GOADY: In Maryland, we have had good results. When we look at our Maryland state assessment scores of our children in reading before Reading First, up until last year, we see growth in all of our Reading First school districts and in all of our schools. So test scores is one way that we measure that.

But more importantly, when we go into classrooms and we see teachers who feel more confident about their skills, who are better able to teach a variety of readers with a variety of needs, differentiated needs, and we`re able to see them be successful, and we`re able to see children reading, and reading successfully, we`re making success. We`re moving forward.

JEFFREY BROWN: I wonder, Mr. Christensen, is this a debate over defining what we mean by reading or reading comprehension or what kids can actually read? What exactly is the problem in how to determine success in something like this?

DOUGLAS CHRISTENSEN: Well, I think that is one of the issues, that`s at the heart of that, is that the measurement of reading looks more at the sub-skills of reading than the actual outcome of reading, which is being able to comprehend, being able to place meaning in the words that are being used, and then to turn around and be able to write on the basis of what you have read.

And I see no evidence that Reading First has done that. In fact, the sole and almost exclusive use of DIBELS, in my opinion, prevents Reading First from accomplishing what it could accomplish.

DIBELS is certainly an indicator that kids are developing some degree of fluency in the ability to recognize and pronounce words, even nonsense words, but it has nothing to do with grasping meaning, or understanding, or being able to take an idea and make it your own.

And I think that, as a result, we`ve prescribed reading to a point where we`re certainly meeting the prescriptions. The indicators are clear, but the outcomes simply are not there. And confusing indicators with outcomes is a guarantee of failure.

JEFFREY BROWN: Ms. Goady, how do you account for the results of this study that came out yesterday from the Department of Education`s research center?

MICHELE GOADY: Well, when you look at the study, first of all, it looked at growth for the first part or first two years of Reading First. This is an interim report, not a final report. So we`re very anxious to see what`s going to happen as we look at the final report.

However, even looking at the report -- it looked at about 18 schools, I believe, which is a small set of all of Reading First -- it did point to -- certainly, the report pointed to things that we can begin to review and we can even look at, in terms of giving more emphasis, more work on.
But more importantly, it did say that teachers understood scientifically based reading research in more comprehensive way. The report did say that there was more time spent in reading instruction, as compared to before Reading First.

So even the report pointed to some advancements that have happened because of Reading First.
JEFFREY BROWN: Mr. Christensen, as I said in the introduction, President Bush
clearly tied this to his larger No Child Left Behind effort. And that, of course, has been criticized by some for its approach and the testing and the standardization. Is part of your problem with this particular program tied up in that larger critique, as well?

DOUGLAS CHRISTENSEN: Well, in some sense, yes. In another sense, no. In the sense that you can standardize what our students are to learn and how they are to be taught simply, in my opinion, flies in the face of what it is that we`re trying to teach and what our schools should be about.

We`re trying to produce worthy citizens. And fourth-grade math scores or second-grade DIBELS scores are not an indicator of the degree to which we`re producing kids who are competent, and capable, and self-reliant, and so forth.

I certainly don`t want to ignore those things. But to make those indicators be outcomes is a perversion of both Reading First and No Child Left Behind.

JEFFREY BROWN: Did I hear you say -- did I hear you use the word "DIBELS"?

DOUGLAS CHRISTENSEN: Yes, I did.

JEFFREY BROWN: And what is that?

DOUGLAS CHRISTENSEN: DIBELS is a test -- and I don`t know exactly what it stands for -- but it`s a test that`s used to determine the student`s speed and accuracy in recognizing words that are commonly appropriate for a first-grader, a second-grader, and so forth.

But, again, it`s a word recognition. It may be primer to fluency, but it doesn`t in any way constitute a measure of understanding or the ability to purport meaning to it. And almost all the projects are required to use DIBELS as its outcome measure, and DIBELS is not an outcome. Comprehension is an outcome.

And I think that`s the other part of it. When you try to change practice from so far away from our classrooms, you use indicators as outcomes and it becomes a practice of remote control.
And I`m going to oppose anything, whether it`s a No Child Left Behind, Reading First, Math First, or whatever else comes along, when it begins to diminish the professionalism and judgment of teachers, I simply can`t support that. We should be informing them, not taking that away from them.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, Ms. Goady, we have time for a brief response to all of that.

MICHELE GOADY: OK. Well, I think DIBELS, just to answer that, is one of the measures that we use to take a snapshot, to look at where children are at a point in time in their reading.
Teachers use that information. We talk about using data to inform instruction, to inform the instruction that a child is going to receive.

So based on what we see from DIBELS, it helps direct, to some extent, what we`re going to do next. And I think that`s important.

When we think about progress monitoring, DIBELS is one progress monitoring instrument. There are many. There`s also the SAT 10 and other kinds of outcome measures that are used across the state.

What to me is the real story of Reading First is that we have teachers that, because of the systematic training we`ve provided, are better able to teach children, coaches that are able to support teachers.

In Maryland, we have a system of community colleges, universities, institutions of higher-ed, which are getting some of the same information so that it can help train our pre-service and our in-service teachers.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, Michele Goady and Douglas Christensen, thank you both very much.

DOUGLAS CHRISTENSEN: Thank you.

Reading First Press Conference

Yesterday KSN&C reported on the Fordham Institute's call for an investigation into the Reading First scandal.

Reading First, one of President Bush’s highest priorities under the No Child Left Behind Act, came under fire in a series of highly critical reports by the Education Department’s inspector general that found favoritism for certain textbook publishers and other management problems in the program’s early years...

With typical DC overkill, rather than fixing "the problem" and keeping the program, the Reading First budget was slashed from about $1 billion per year to less than $4oo,000. That means upwards of 4,000 of America's toughest schools will lose one of the more effective federal efforts ever to reach public school children.

Fordham is touting a recent report that they say tells, "The True Story of Reading First."

In this You Tube clip former Bush Ed Department appointee Mike Petrilli, now a vice president with the Fordham Institute, speaks from the steps of the US Department of Education.

Taking it to the Streets

Fordham Foundation demands investigation

into real Reading First scandals

Calls for Secretary Margaret Spellings, Rep. David Obey

and ED's Office of the Inspector General

to account for their actions

Washington--At a press conference held outside the U.S. Department of Education headquarters today, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute demanded an inquiry into scandalous efforts by the executive and legislative branches to sabotage the Reading First program.

Designed to help poor children learn primary-reading skills, Reading First is the only program among the many contained in the No Child Left Behind act to receive stamps of approval from both the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

Yet, Reading First's funding has been slashed by two-thirds, the Bush Administration has gone AWOL on this once-loved program, and its first director, Christopher Doherty, was forced to resign--all purportedly because of a "scandal" uncovered by the Education Department's Office of the Inspector General (OIG).

Fordham's latest report, Too Good to Last: The True Story of Reading First, written by City Journal contributing editor Sol Stern, reveals the real scandals that have yet to be brought to public attention...

Directors of ‘Reading First’ Plagued by Anxiety Over Budget Cuts

The federal Reading First initiative is not likely to survive if massive funding cuts are not reversed, several state directors for the program told federal officials at a meeting here this week. Key elements of the program—reading coaches in each school, professional development for teachers, core reading programs and interventions, data analysis, and accountability measures—must all be sustained to ensure that it improves reading instruction at participating schools, they maintained. “How do you do all this when you are dealing with a 61 percent cut in funding?” asked Lynann Barbero, who oversees the Reading First grants for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. “When you put all the pieces into a structure and pull out one of the pieces, it falls apart.”

This from Education Week (subscription).

Garrison Keillor smacks fellow Democrats for wholesale opposition to flawed Republican NCLB

Garrison Keillor invokes the assistance of Saint Michael the Archangel, patron of mariners, to raise reading scores for struggling 4th graders ...who are "at sea" ...I guess.

Keillor accurately points out that NCLB, which is looking doomed these days, need not be trashed when it can be fixed. The assessment system is a problem for its bad design and resulting tendency to undermine the very growth it hopes to support. The Reading First scandal showed the Republican administration's willingness to subordinate a noble purpose to specific commercial interests, but is still a worthy effort - and one of the few places NCLB actually put some money toward improving conditions for kids.

Keillor keeps the focus where is ought to be - on the kids, and off of partisan politics.

We're failing our kids

No Child Left Behind has plenty of flaws,

but throwing it out because it's a Republican plan

is morally disgusting.

By Garrison Keillor at Salon.com.

...Reading is the key to everything. Teaching children to read is a fundamental moral obligation of the society. That 27 percent are at serious risk of crippling illiteracy is an outrageous scandal.

This is a bleak picture for an old Democrat. Face it, the schools are not run by Republican oligarchs in top hats and spats but by perfectly nice, caring, sharing people, with a smattering of yoga/raga/tofu/mojo/mantra folks like my old confreres. Nice people are failing these kids, but when they are called on it, they get very huffy. When the grand poobah Ph.D.s of education stand up and blow, they speak with great confidence about heories of teaching, and considering the test results, the bums ought to be thrown out.

There is much evidence that teaching phonics really works, specially with kids with learning disabilities, a growing constituency. But because phonics is associated with behaviorism and with conservatives, and because the Current Occupant has spoken on the subject, my fellow liberals are opposed.

Liberal dogma says that each child is inherently gifted and will read if only he is read to. This was true of my grandson; it is demonstrably not true of many kids, including my sandy-haired, gap-toothed daughter. The No Child Left Behind initiative has plenty of flaws, but the Democrats who are trashing it should take another look at the Reading First program. It is morally disgusting if Democrats throw out Republican programs that are good for children. Life is not a scrimmage. Grown-ups who stick with dogma even though it condemns children to second-class lives should be put on buses and sent to North Dakota to hoe wheat for a year.

St. Michael, I beg you to send angels to watch over fourth-graders who are struggling to read, because the righteous among us are not doing the job.

President Bush approves $59.2 billion Education Budget

Budget Raises Title I, Cuts Reading First

Yesterday President Bush has signed into a law a $59.2 billion bill that will increase federal education spending by 2.9 percent in fiscal year 2008.

The appropriation for U.S. Department of Education programs during the fiscal year that began Oct. 1 is part of a larger budget drama in which Democrats largely gave in to a hard-line White House stance that earlier measures contained too much in domestic spending increases.

In signing the bill, a $550 billion omnibus measure that includes fiscal 2008 spending for most other Cabinet agencies as well as the Education Department President Bush complained that the bill contains nearly 9,800 earmarks, totaling more than $10 billion.

“These projects are not funded through a merit-based process and provide a vehicle for wasteful government spending,” the president wrote.

Education Week reports:

The measure will provide $13.9 billion to the Title I program for disadvantaged students, an 8.6 percent increase over the $12.8 billion appropriated for the program in fiscal 2007. But the amount is about 2 percent less than what was proposed for the program in a bill vetoed by President Bush in November.

By contrast, the Reading First program was cut significantly under the legislation, dropping from $1 billion last year to $393 million in fiscal 2008. That is slightly more severe than the $400 million proposed for the program in the vetoed spending bill.

Reading First, one of President Bush’s highest priorities under the No Child Left Behind Act, came under fire in a series of highly critical reports over the past 15 months by the Education Department’s inspector general that found favoritism for certain textbook publishers and other management problems in the program’s early years...

Advisory Panel Finds ‘Reading First’ Data Less Than Definitive

Washington - State-by-state data on the federal Reading First program were released with fanfare this past spring by the U.S. Department of Education as evidence that the initiative was fueling “tremendous progress” among students and teachers. The Reading First Advisory Committee, a federal panel that met for the first time here this week, found that information on student achievement in participating schools far less definitive and has asked for more time and technical assistance in evaluating the data from the $1 billion-a-year program.

“It seems like there are no standards anyone can interpret,” said committee member Frank R. Vellutino, a prominent reading researcher from the State University of New York at Albany.
He was referring to the variations among states in the assessments used to gauge students’ reading skills, as well as differences in cutoff scores used to determine whether children are on track toward becoming “proficient” readers.

“It’s going to be a job and a half to come to any conclusion whether states are meeting their responsibilities” in improving achievement in Reading First schools, Mr. Vellutino said.

The committee was given a thick binder filled with test-score data from grantees, which states are required to submit to the department each year. The information is based on the assessments and proficiency benchmarks set by each state as part of its Reading First plan...

This from Education Week (subscription).

Moving Beyond Identification: Assisting Schools in Improvement

Reading First suffered bad press recently due to some sweetheart deals that locked out certain programs and favored select assessment tools that are...questionable.

Despite that, Reading First is a major effort to bring resources to the classroom level in terms of curriculum and - most importantly - improved quality of instruction.

Lose the corruption. Keep the program.

Last week Education Secretary Margaret Spellings released a statement in response to a Center on Education Policy study that said:

• state and local education officials report the Reading First program, which may be facing funding cuts, has been effective in schools identified as needing improvement;
• professional development and curriculum alignment were cited as effective;
• Reading First is much more popular than school choice and supplemental assistance programs.

The report advocates significant increases to Title I funds; a triage approach to school assistance; and funding for external monitoring of school improvements.
~

Statement by Secretary Spellings on Center for (sic) Education Policy Report

Washington, D.C. — In response to the Center for Education Policy's release of Moving Beyond Identification: Assisting Schools in Improvement, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said the following:

The Center on Education Policy's report adds to overwhelming evidence that Reading First is working. These encouraging findings show that the vast majority of school districts find Reading First effective in lifting achievement at struggling schools.

Reading First is the most effective and successful reading initiative in the nation's history, and I have seen the positive results firsthand in classrooms throughout our country. Literacy is the foundation of learning, and we know that student improvements in fluency and comprehension help them succeed in other subjects as well.

Reading First is one of many meaningful No Child Left Behind reforms that are helping close the achievement gap and boost student performance. Now we must work together to reauthorize the law and restore funding this year. We can't afford to take tools like Reading First away from the students who need them most.

Democrats Move to Slash ‘Reading First’

House subcommittee's fiscal 2008

plan would cut program 61 percent.

House Democrats want to put their own stamp on federal education spending by increasing Title I and other programs they favor and slashing Reading First and other priorities set by President Bush.

In the $56 billion fiscal 2008 spending bill for the Department of Education unveiled by the Democrats, No Child Left Behind Act programs would receive a $2 billion increase, with the Title I program for disadvantaged students receiving $1.5 billion of that.

But the $1.03 billion Reading First program—which the Bush administration points to as one of its biggest accomplishments under the NCLB law—would take a cut of $630 million, or 61 percent. What’s more, the administration’s latest proposals for private school vouchers and new mathematics programs would not be funded at all.

"This [Reading First] cut will not be restored until we have a full appreciation of the shenanigans that have been going on,” said Rep. David R. Obey, D-Wis., the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. Reports by the Department of Education’s inspector general and congressional investigators have outlined management and ethical questions involving the program.

Republicans voiced no objections to the Reading First cuts or other spending levels during the June 7 session of the appropriations panel’s Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Subcommittee. The subcommittee approved the Democratic plan in a unanimous voice vote.

“If I were chairman,” said Rep. James T. Walsh, R-N.Y., the subcommittee’s senior Republican, “I don’t know that I would have made the bill a whole lot different.”

...Some reading experts agreed that, despite the problems with Reading First outlined in six inspector general reports since last fall, the program is worth saving.

The findings essentially supported complaints that federal officials appeared to favor the use of some commercial programs, and discouraged others, during the implementation of Reading First. The inspector general’s findings largely substantiated the allegations of conflict of interest and mismanagement in the program. A Senate education committee report last month also described alleged ethical breaches by reading experts who gained financially while assisting in the rollout of the 5-year-old program. ("Senate Report Cites ‘Reading First’ Conflicts," May 16, 2007.)

“The move to eviscerate the program by drastically cutting it is the ultimate example of throwing the baby out with the bath water,” said Alan E. Farstrup, the executive director of the Newark, Del.-based International Reading Association.

This from Education Week (subscription).

Allegations of wrongdoing plague Bush reading program

When the Kansas City public schools lost federal money for their new reading program, Robert Slavin was plenty distressed.

Slavin, who'd designed the program used in Kansas City, had seen the pattern all too often: Local officials try to get government grants to help pay for his scripted Success for All reading program, only to realize that it's fallen out of bureaucratic favor in Washington.

"There have been many of these decisions - this is only the latest," said Slavin, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Fueled by a growing list of such complaints, the House Education and Labor Committee is looking into whether the Bush administration steered contracts to its favorite vendors, shutting out Slavin and other competitors.

This from the McClatchy Newspapers.

Spellings Pulls A Gonzales

Alexander Russo's blog commentary from This Week in Education was recently picked up by the Huffington Post. Here's his take on Spelling's Capitol Hill performance last week.

The only thing saving Education Secretary Margaret Spellings

from drifting into Alberto Gonzales territory

right now is, well, Alberto Gonzales.

If it weren't for the fact that everyone's attention is focused on him, more folks would notice that Spellings has been up to some very Gonzales-like things over at the Department of Education. (You can watch a video of the testimony here.)

In response to the growing litany of reports and investigations surrounding misdeeds in the multi-billion-dollar student lending industry, Spellings has, somewhat unbelievably, claimed that she lacked the authority to take on the lenders and universities who were manipulating the system for financial gain.

In response to the scandal surrounding an early literacy program called Reading First, which independent reports have found full of conflicts of interest and unwise if not illegal implementation, Spellings argues that she wasn't Secretary then and that everyone involved - former Secretary Rod Paige, former Assistant Secretary Gene Hickock, and others - has left.

True, Spellings wasn't Secretary back then when Reading First was headed off the rails. But it's not like she wasn't there. Before becoming the EdSec, Spellings was head of the Domestic Policy Council, which oversees education from the White House.

And yet, Spellings claims clean hands.

"It would have been impossible for me to have been intimately involved with oversight of all those programs," she said last week in Los Angeles about her responsibilities at the DPC. It's a response that comes awfully close to Gonzales infuriating claims to have not been involved in the Attorney General firings, and to not remember key events.

The Gonzales-Spellings similarities don't end there.

Like Gonzales, Spellings is continually vexed by a former employee who contradicts her account of events. For Gonzales, it's Kyle Sampson. For Spellings, it's Chris Doherty, the former head of the Reading First program, who was summarily dismissed when things started to heat up.

Doherty claims that the White House was intimately involved in every step of the implementation of the program, which allegedly violated federal statutes by excluding certain reading programs from being used. ("Four Officials Profited From Publishers, Report Finds," The Washington Post)

But none of this has led to the type of bipartisan piling-on that Gonzales has endured, nor the calls for her resignation...

For her part, Spellings has done her best to address the allegations against her management of these programs, and to divert attention when she can't. She announced the departure of one top student lending official on Tuesday, just before she was scheduled to testify. ("Federal Student Loan Official Is Resigning", The New York Times) She encouraged the House passage of a student lending "sunshine" law the day before she was to appear, which took much of the steam out of the Thursday proceedings. ("House Passes Ban on Gifts From Student Lenders", The New York Times)

This editorial from the New York Times underscores the point:

“It’s not our fault.” That’s what Education Secretary Margaret Spellings seemed to say while testifying before Congress last week about her department’s failure to halt the payoffs, kickbacks and general looting of the public treasury by a lending company that collected nearly $300 million in undeserved subsidies. But that doesn’t track with the federal Higher Education Act, which clearly authorizes the secretary to disqualify from federal programs lenders who employ payoffs, kickbacks and unethical practices like those that have been found to be commonplace in the college lending business.

Spellings Testimony requested by House Education committee

Chairman George Miller has requested testimony from Education Secretary Margaret Spellings on the Reading First and federal student loan messes.

The letter to Spellings says, "Recent events pertaining to the operation of our Federal student loan programs and the Reading First program have raised serious questions about the oversight and management activities of the Departemnt of Education."

This Week in Education reports May 10th as the probable date.

Miller says "New York Attorney General Anderew Cuomo and others have uncovered disturbing arrangements between institutions of higher education and student lenders" that have "disadvantaged students through higher loan costs" and less favorable terms and conditions... He cited "inadequate oversight" and the department's failure to provide the committee with requested information on how the department was responding to the "still developing crisis."

"Additionally, committee investigators have uncovered serious conflicts of interest and mismanagement issues in the Reading First program," Miller wrote.

In light of the recent testimony of Attorney General Gonzales, and President Bush's praise of it, one imagines Spellings practicing for her big moment under the spotlight: "Congressman, I do not recall the Reading First program." "Student loans? I don't remember any discussions about student loans."

This Week in ... Reading First

Alexander Russo's collection of quotes from the Reading First hearings.

“This hearing made it pretty clear that there was a very incestuous relationship among a small group of people in the Education Department and among contractors. They were very clearly using this program … for profit.”

"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."

"I'm very disappointed and saddened by the information that was provided at the hearing today," said former Bush reading advisor G. Reid Lyon, who had been a strong defender of Reading First. "The issues appear much more serious than I had been led to understand."

From This Week in Education.

And this from the Washington Post.

House Panel Grills Witnesses on Reading First

This week's Education Week will report:

The inspector general of the U.S. Department of Education has referred some of the information gathered in a lengthy audit of the Reading First program to federal law-enforcement officials for further investigation, he said during a lengthy and contentious hearing today before the House Education and Labor Committee.

Inspector General John P. Higgins Jr. told the committee, in response to a question on whether he had recommended any criminal review, that he has made “referrals to the Department of Justice.” He declined to elaborate to reporters at the end of the hearing.

The former director of the Reading First program denied in the April 20 congressional hearing that there were conflicts of interest in the implementation of the $1 billion-a-year federal initiative. He also denied that he and other officials and consultants had overstepped their authority in directing states and school districts on the curriculum materials and assessments that would meet the strict requirements of the grants awarded under the program.

“A distorted story has been written over the past few months based on the worst possible interpretation of events that occurred during the early days of the Reading First program,” Christopher J. Doherty, who oversaw the program from 2002 until last fall, told the education committee during the hearing.

Mr. Doherty disputed suggestions by Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the committee’s chairman, that he and other federal officials had drafted the Reading First guidelines to institute “extralegal requirements”—as Mr. Doherty had once put it in an e-mail—that were not specified in the No Child Left Behind Act to essentially compel states to adopt certain commercial reading programs and assessments over others.

“We thought and think those [additional] components [written into the program’s guidelines but not outlined in the law] emanated from the guiding research,” Mr. Doherty said. “In no way was [the guidance] designed to lock in” one particular program, he added.

Reading First Paying Off, Education Dept. Says

At some point folks ought to realize that there was nothing magical about the particular programs foisted on the Reading First program by unethical bureaucrats. The "magic" comes from giving teachers the resources they need to raise achievement, which Reading First did. These were BIG grants. Had a balanced literacy approach been advocated, I have no doubt the results would have been as great - or greater.
~
This from Amit R. Paley, Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 19, 2007; Page A19

Students in the Bush administration's embattled $1 billion-a-year reading program have improved an average of about 15 percent on tests measuring fluency over the past five years, according to an analysis of data by the Education Department.

The Reading First program, a central part of the No Child Left Behind law, has been criticized by congressional Democrats who say it has been riddled with conflicts of interests and mismanagement. The House education committee is holding an oversight hearing on the matter Friday.

The data, scheduled to be released today, indicate that students have benefited from the program, which provides grants to improve reading in kindergarten through third grade.

"That's the irony," said John F. Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy. "The program was poorly -- even unethically -- administered at the federal level, yet it seems to be having a positive effect in schools."

Multibillion dollar textbook scandal reaches Congress

This from Greg Toppo at USA TODAY:

A slow-motion scandal surrounding a federal multibillion-dollar reading program has its first congressional hearing this week, but it remains to be seen whether the scrutiny will shed any new light on a complex, contradictory tale of textbooks, tests and allegations of federal arm-twisting.

A key part of President Bush's efforts to remake public education, Reading First was launched in 2002, giving schools $1 billion a year to improve reading in early elementary grades. Five years later, early evidence suggests that it may be helping. But investigators say a handful of advisers have railroaded schools into buying textbooks and other materials that they and associates developed.

The result: a conflict-of-interest case that took two years to jell as investigators in the Education Department connected the dots. To date, no criminal charges have been filed, but Democrats, now in control of Congress, promise to give the case a full airing.