By Daniel Pryzbyla
Columnist EdNews.org

"Key Initiative of 'No Child' Under Federal Investigation – Officials Profited From Reading First Program," read the headline in the April 21, 2007 Washington Post newspaper. It was a "bad hair day" for Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.

A month earlier she had testified at a Senate subcommittee hearing seeking $56 billion for her 2008 budget, including extension of the No Child Left Behind Title 1 education act for poverty students and its Reading First program. Equally revealing was the beginning of her prepared text at the March 14 subcommittee hearing. "There is a broad consensus on the importance of education for America's future in our increasingly competitive global economy," said Spellings at the onset of her prepared text. "A new entrepreneurial spirit (is) in our education system that is most evident in the growing number of charter schools…"

Spellings is stretching her "entrepreneurial" definition: "Entrepreneur - a person who organizes and manages any enterprise; especially a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk." Spellings, Charters & Co. has a fly in its entrepreneurial ointment – they use taxpayers' dollars instead to finance and profit from their "initiative and risk." Without taxpayer dollars, how many charter schools would even exist? Even charter advocate Spellings depends on taxpayer dollars for her guaranteed salary and benefits. The high failure rate of "entrepreneur" start-ups proves no such certainties.

"Outsourcing" public services can become an "entrepreneurial" playground when governmental services accept bids for a contract. When large projects are needed, but a town, city, state or federal agency is not equipped to handle them, it is necessary to depend on private contractors. However, government contracts have more specific guidelines to adhere to than non-governmental contracts. This was true with NCLB's Reading First program.

"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," wrote Post writer Amit R. Paley. Christopher J. Doherty, a former director of Reading First, said that he was questioned by Justice officials in November. "Doherty, one 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," reported Paley.

"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," noted the Post writer.

"That sounds like a criminal enterprise to me," said Rep. George Miller (D-California), chairman of the House education committee, which held a five-hour investigative hearing, Paley reported. "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."

"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 Spellings was Bush's top education adviser," the reporter said. Quoting Doherty, "This program was always firmly under the watch and control of the highest levels of the government."

Continuing her testimony to the Senate subcommittee, Spellings said the $56 billion budget request also included $250 million for the "elementary and middle school components of Math Now, which would encourage the use of research-based instruction to improve math achievement." The department was also "requesting $100 million for the Striving Readers program, which helps raise high school achievement by promoting research-based methods for improving the skills of teenage students who are reading below grade level." Hmm. These so-called "research-based" inclusions seem to have taken on a life of their own.

Her budget testimony was a month prior to the Justice Department probe on the $6 billion Reading First program – that was also "research-based," similar to her current demands for the new "Math Now" and "Striving Readers" programs listed above. No sense for the Justice Department to pack its bags and leave now. Unless the NCLB "research-based" bulldogs have been trained otherwise, expect more congressional hearings in the near future. Of course, if it took this long to track down the Reading First "entrepreneurs," Spellings and her House of Charters will have already long departed.

"I look forward to what I expect will be a vigorous debate this year as we work together on both the 2008 appropriation for the Department of Education and the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind," Spellings concluded in her testimony draft. "Vigorous debate"? With entrepreneurs lining up again, expect more "no comment" instead.

Published April 30, 2007