A Parent On NCLB

With this year's election hype focused on the economy and health
care, it seems the impact of No Child Left Behind on working-class
families has been overshadowed by other issues. Not for me.

Reauthorization of NCLB was expected to go to a congressional vote
but has been postponed until after the presidential election. As the
mother of three children in public schools, I would like to see this
bungled attempt at education reform left behind.

Somehow our public education system has interpreted this law to mean
that today's young children will write like accomplished authors,
conduct experiments according to strict scientific methodology and
zip through algebra and geometry without learning basic math. All at
the same tender age when their not-so-distant forebears were trapping
bugs in jars, writing fanciful stories, and savoring the aroma of
teacher-prepared mimeograph practice sheets for plain old ordinary
arithmetic.

In the 1980s, a national report on U.S. education sounded the alarm
that "Johnny can't read," echoing a report from three decades
earlier. I was as appalled as anyone.

But make no mistake. NCLB goes far beyond requiring the schools to
teach reading (which they still don't do very well). My youngest
child was required to read "fluently" — with no pauses to decipher
unfamiliar words — in his first nine weeks of first grade. His
reading material included discussions of the political and social
structure of a Hawaiian township, complete with multisyllabic words
and Hawaiian names. His teacher recommended retention. I fought it,
and he got summer school instead (along with hordes of other
disillusioned young scholars).

The irony of NCLB is that those kids who can't keep up — whose
parents can't afford expensive tutors or give up their jobs to
provide oodles of one-on-one assistance — are in more danger than
ever of getting left behind as educators insist they must do away
with so-called "social promotion."

Since that disastrous first-grade year, I have been called to at
least one conference annually letting me know that my child is
failing to be more than he can be. Educators deliver this news with
straight faces, despite the fact that they have failed to teach
phonics, addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, or
cursive writing. (Such lessons may seem simple, but they help develop
essential concentration and memory skills.)

My youngest studies as instructed, makes steady progress and rarely
misses class. Yet he scores poorly in the never-ending stream of
assessments. The school system's answer? A notation of "below grade
level" on the report card and the threat of retention. My son would
be entitled to a government-subsidized tutor, I was told, only after
he fails a grade.

I can trace the madness to my oldest child's fourth-grade year, 2000-
01, when NCLB was on the road to approval. Requirements for promotion
included her ability to fill out a job application. She was 9.
Ridiculous, yes, but relatively harmless.

My second child entered kindergarten that year. Homework consisted of
cut-and-paste exercises and measuring household items. Using scissors
would help my child develop fine motor skills for writing, I was
told, and measuring things would foster an appreciation for real-life
math applications. My pleas for the child to bring home writing
practice and simple math worksheets fell on deaf ears. To this day,
her handwriting is illegible, and she doesn't like math any better
because she knows how to measure a doorknob.

Since then, it has been one fad or alleged silver bullet after
another, as educators experiment with shortcuts and ways to get
parents "involved," which is code for making them pseudo-teachers.
Never mind that parents work long hours and have no spare time to do
the government's job.

In Hillsborough County, since 2003-04, parents of children as young
as 8 have been coerced into coaching strictly structured science
experiments that belong in the higher grades. At my child's
elementary school, participation is mandatory by third grade. Weary
parents joke wryly about staying up until midnight working on display
boards and graphs, trying to wrestle their offspring's childish
curiosity into something that resembles an MIT-caliber experiment.

The government's Web site www.ed.gov/nclb claims the act holds
schools accountable. All I see is the pressure that has fallen on
children and their parents. Without the recognition that there are no
one-size-fits-all teaching methods and the funding for a true
education fix, NCLB is detrimental to my family. It undermines
childhood pleasures and threatens to destroy my son's self-esteem. I
want it to go away.

Susan Green lives in Hillsborough County.

Accountability Tests' Instructional Insensitivity: The Time Bomb Ticketh

COMMENTARY
By W. James Popham

Education Week [American Education's Newspaper of Record], Wednesday, November 14, 2007, Volume 27, Issue 12, pp. 30-31. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2007/11/14/12popham.h27.html?print=1

Would you ever want your temperature to be taken with a thermometer that was unaffected by heat? Of course not; that would be dumb. Or would you ever want to weigh yourself with bathroom scales that weren't influenced by the weight of the person using them? Of course not again; that would be equally dumb. But today's educators are allowing their instructional success to be judged by students' scores on accountability tests that are essentially incapable of distinguishing between effective and ineffective instruction. Talk about dumb.

What's worse is that we are now racing toward the 2014 deadline of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the point at which all students are supposed to have attained test-based "proficiency." But the 2002-2014 schedules that most states devised when establishing their goals for annual required numbers of proficient students will soon demand some staggering increases in how many students must earn proficient scores on state NCLB tests each year. These balloon-payment improvement schedules were, in most instances, adopted as a way of deferring the pain stemming from having too many state schools and districts flop in reaching their goals for adequate yearly progress, or AYP.

Such cunningly crafted, soft-to-start improvement schedules will lead in a very few years to altogether unrealistic requirements for improved test scores. Without such improvements, huge numbers of U.S. schools and districts will be seen as AYP failures. If the American public is skeptical now about the quality of public schools, how do you think citizens will react when, in the next several years, test-based AYP failure becomes the rule rather than the exception? Can you hear the ticking of this nontrivial time bomb?

How could American educators let themselves get into a situation in which the tests being used to evaluate their instruction are unable to distinguish between effective and ineffective teaching? The answer, though simple, is nonetheless disquieting. Most American educators simply don't know that their state's NCLB tests are instructionally insensitive. Educators, and the public in general, assume that because such tests are "achievement tests," they accurately measure how much students have learned in schools. That's just not true.

Two types of accountability tests are currently being used to satisfy the No Child Left Behind law's assessment requirements. About half of the nation's NCLB tests consist of traditional, off-the-shelf, standardized achievement tests, usually supplemented by a sprinkling of new items, so that the slightly expanded tests will supposedly be better aligned with a particular state's content standards. Other NCLB tests are made-from-scratch, customized standards-based accountability tests, built specifically for a given state. Let's see, briefly, why both these types of tests are instructionally insensitive.

Traditional standardized achievement tests, such as the Stanford Achievement Test-10th Edition, are intended to provide comparative information about test-takers. So the performance of a student who scores at, for instance, the 96th percentile can be contrasted with that of students who score at lower percentiles. To accomplish this comparative-measurement mission, these tests must produce a substantial degree of "score spread," so there are ample numbers of high scores, middle scores, and low scores. Most items on such tests are of middle-difficulty levels because such items, statistically, maximize score spread.

Over the years, however, many of these middle-difficulty items turn out to be closely linked to students' socioeconomic status. More-affluent kids tend to answer these socioeconomically linked items correctly, while less-affluent kids tend to miss them. This occurs because socioeconomic status, or SES, is a nicely distributed variable, and one that doesn't change rapidly; SES-linked items help generate the score spread required by traditional standardized achievement tests. When such tests are used as accountability assessments, however, they tend to measure the socioeconomic composition of a school's student body, rather than the effectiveness with which those students have been taught. The more SES-linked items there are on a traditional standardized achievement test, the more instructionally insensitive that test is bound to be.
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SIDEBAR: How could American educators let themselves get into a situation in which the tests being used to evaluate their instruction are unable to distinguish between effective and ineffective teaching?
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The other type of NCLB accountability test used in the United States is usually described as a "standards-based test," because such tests are deliberately built to assess students' mastery of a given state's content standards, that is, its curricular aims. In all but a few states, though, the number of content standards to be assessed is so large that there is no way to accurately assess-via an annual accountability test-students' mastery of this immense array of skills and knowledge. Instead, each year's accountability test must sample from the profusion of the state's curricular aims. Such a sampling-based approach to annual assessment means that teachers end up guessing about which curricular aims will be assessed each year. And, given the huge numbers of potentially assessable curricular targets, most teachers guess wrong.

After a few years of incorrect guessing, many teachers simply give up on trying to mesh their teaching with what's to be assessed on each year's accountability tests. And when this happens, it turns out that the major determinant of how well a school's students perform on accountability tests is the very same factor that governed students' performances on traditional standardized achievement tests: socioeconomic status. Thus, even on customized standards-based tests, a school's scores are influenced less by what students are taught than by what the students brought to that school. Most standards-based accountability tests are every bit as instructionally insensitive as traditional standardized achievement tests.

The instructional insensitivity of accountability tests does not represent an insuperable problem, however. Remember when, several decades ago, we began to recognize that there was considerable test bias in our high-stakes educational assessments? Once this difficulty had been identified, it was attacked with both empirical and judgmental bias-detection procedures. As a consequence, today's educational tests are markedly less biased than were their predecessors. Once the test-bias problem had been identified, we set out to fix it-and in less than a decade, we did.

That's precisely what we need to do now. Using a mildly technical definition, a test's instructional sensitivity represents the degree to which students' performances on that test accurately reflect the quality of instruction specifically provided to promote students' mastery of what is being assessed. We need to discover how to build accountability tests that will be instructionally sensitive and, therefore, can provide valid inferences about effective and ineffective instruction. It may take several years to get the required procedures in place, but we need to get started right now.

In the short term, though, we must make citizens, and especially educational policy makers, understand that almost all of today's accountability tests yield an invalid picture of how well students are being taught. Accountability systems based on the use of such instructionally insensitive tests are flat-out senseless. We need accountability tests capable of distinguishing between students who have been properly taught and those who have not. Until such tests are at hand, we might as well re-label our accountability systems as what they are-elaborate and costly socioeconomic-status identifiers.
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W. James Popham is a professor emeritus in the graduate school of education and information studies of the University of California, Los Angeles. He now lives in Wilsonville, Ore.

Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB - Part 1

This is the first piece of a 23 part (so far) series. Kathy Emory attended the high stakes testing conference John Lawhead and I attended in Birmingham. Al. in 2003.

All parts accessible here:

Source: http://www.diatribune.com/bush-profiteers-collect-billions-nclb

Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB

Much was said about George W. Bush’s fundraising prowess in 2000 and 2004, when he created labels like "Bush Pioneers" to identify those who shook down donors and bundled the lucre for his campaigns. But hard on the heels of his inauguration, he might’ve just as appropriately created a new label, "Bush Profiteers," to identify those who first turned his decayed ideologies into law – inventing new spigots through which Bush’s businessmen-backers could suck federal funds – and who then vacated public service to collect their own lucre as lobbyists for those businessmen and their companies.

If you needed a perfect example of this model of lawmaking-turned-moneymaking, you might consider Bush’s vaunted No Child Left Behind. And if you needed a perfect example of the Bush Profiteer, you might consider the first "senior education advisor" he imported from Texas, the architect of NCLB himself.

I offer a simple thesis: Several large corporations and their lobbyists have profited from Bush’s NCLB by tapping billions of dollars in standardized testing and in "supplemental education services" funds since its passage in 2001. They’re lining up now to expand their profit margins for the next six years as NCLB is being re-authorized. And the one man who stands to personally profit the most this year isn’t Bush himself, but advisor-turned-lobbyist Sandy Kress, the architect of Bush’s old high-stakes testing model in Texas and the overhaul of ESEA in 2001.

As Bush himself might put it, "Heck of a job, Sandy." Ahem: http://www.whitehouse.gov/...

KATHY EMERY KNOWS something about educating kids. Her resume, found here http://www.educationanddemocracy.org... , documents a 30-year career as a history teacher-turned-education researcher. Credentials impeccable. She’s published and presented and given workshops and been interviewed on testing and assessment and good education practices, so she’s got skills. And she writes, "When Ted Kennedy and George Bush agree on something, one needs to worry about who the man behind the curtain is. After doing research for my dissertation (which is now a book) it became clear to me that the men behind the curtain are the members of the Business Roundtable."

In a speech given in January 2005 to the San Francisco State University faculty retreat in Asilomar, California, she detailed the convergence of two heretofore unconjoined worlds: the world of big business, and the world of educating kids. The convergence was given birth in the passage of NCLB, she says, but the pregnancy was more than a decade long. Its unsuspecting mother was the Education and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), first adopted under Lyndon Johnson’s administration in 1965 in partial fulfillment of John Kennedy’s domestic agenda. Its father? "...a bipartisan bandwagon of standards based advocates – a bandwagon built in the summer of 1989 by the top 300 CEOs in our country."

Emery's speech is here http://www.educationanddemocracy.org...

At this meeting, the Business Roundtable CEOs agreed that each state legislature needed to adopt legislation that would impose "outcome-based education," "high expectations for all children," "rewards and penalties for individual schools," "greater school-based decision making" and align staff development with these action items. By 1995, the Business Roundtable had refined their agenda to "nine essential components," the first four being state standards, state tests, sanctions and the transformation of teacher education programs. By 2000, our leading CEOs had managed to create an interlocking network of business associations, corporate foundations, governor’s associations, non-profits and educational institutions that had successfully persuaded 16 state legislatures to adopt the first three components of their high stakes testing agenda. This network includes the Education Trust, Annenberg Center, Harvard Graduate School, Public Agenda, Achieve, Inc., Education Commission of the States, the Broad Foundation, Institute for Educational Leadership, federally funded regionally laboratories and most newspaper editorial boards.

By 2000, many states legislatures, however, were balking at the sheer size and scope of what corporate America was demanding. The Business Roundtable took note of this resistance when publishing, in the spring of 2001, a booklet entitled Assessing and Addressing the "Testing Backlash": Practical Advice and Current Public Opinion Research for Business Coalitions and Standards Advocates. My guess is that the timing of this renewed effort to "turn up the heat" involved getting federal government into the act by aligning the federal educational policy with the Business Roundtable’s state-by-state strategy.

Emery quotes Gene Hickock, the under-secretary of education assigned to implement NCLB, speaking to CEOs at the Milken Institute’s Global Conference in 2003: "One of the virtues of NCLB is leverage, leverage at the state. . . at the local level . . . We don’t mind being the bad guys... I am very concerned that we will . . . underestimate the potential that we have to redefine everything."

And Emery pays special attention to Hickock’s desire to "redefine everything." She sketches briefly the intent of the "corporate business class" to control public education systems beginning the 1890s and continuing through "modern comprehensive schools, an important part of which was the introduction of standardized, norm-reference tests."

Why the interest of the "corporate business class" in standardized tests? Emery tells us: "Since the 1890s, these tests, along with the factory like conditions of public high schools, have been central to fulfilling one of the major purposes of our public schools. In an industrial economy, working class students need to be tracked into vocational education and middle class students into college prep courses. This is one reason why we find standardized tests to be more strongly correlated to socio-economic status than to any other variable."

Emery suggests that the corporate climate in the 1980s – pressure from the emergence of Japan, for example – lit a fire beneath America’s corporate interests to accelerate the education process, she surmises; hence, the Business Roundtable’s meeting in 1989 and its development of a "high-stakes testing" model for schools.

It’s clear to me that the fact that its system fails millions of American kids doesn’t deter the leaders of the Business Roundtable: Its goal of marrying the world of big business with the world of educating children has yielded its primary objective, the profit margin. How so?

Education itself isn’t a profit-making venture; no teacher, lunch lady, janitor, principal or bus driver is getting "rich" from "the system." Any dividends on public investment aren’t realized until a child graduates, matures, and becomes a contributing member of society. But a small cottage industry of education support programs has always existed in the private sector, and it included everything from single-subject tutors to after-school or summertime programs for remedial readers. NCLB, the shotgun marriage of Lyndon Johnson’s ESEA with the Business Roundtable’s "high stakes testing" agenda, created a brand-new spigot through which that cottage industry in the private sector could siphon federal education funds. The result: Instant profit – and instant profiteers. What once was just a cottage industry has become a corporate giant.

Says Emery:

Not only do working class and poor students, especially those of color, not learn to read and write, they don’t learn the kinds of skills that would allow them to challenge the direction the Business Roundtable CEO’s are taking this country. Throughout American educational history, there have been educators and activists who have argued against education as merely legitimizing the sorting of students into job categories. Some have created schools based on the joy of learning, or the need for students to be life-long learners. Others have created schools that taught students how to be active agents of social change, or to be skilled citizens in a democratic society. One effect of high stakes testing, one that I am sure the CEO’s are pleased with, is that the historic public debate over what the goals of education should be, a debate going back 2500 years, has been eliminated. Instead, raising tests scores has become an end in itself...

PRESIDING OVER THE SHOTGUN wedding that Emery describes – the forced marriage of ESEA to the Business Roundtable’s agenda – was none other than Sandy Kress. "Pressure" from not-yet-Secretary Margaret Spellings – then still known as Margaret La Montagne – and Kress, "former head of the Dallas school board, seems to be paying off. Already, the Business Roundtable has pledged to air TV ads promoting testing," wrote Richard Dunham in the March 19, 2001, edition of Business Week magazine here http://www.businessweek.com/...

Dunham’s puff-piece on La Montagne/Spellings said the duo was "counting on business leaders such as Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, AT&T CEO C. Michael Armstrong, and Texas Instruments CEO Thomas J. Engibous to lobby Congress on behalf of Bush's cherished annual performance tests..."

Mere weeks later, columnist Robert Novak credited Kress as half of Bush’s Texan education brain trust, and Bush’s emissary to Congress at a time when the legislative branch was still evaluating its untested executive. "...Who convinced the president to build this bridge for the enemy? Republican House members finger two White House aides brought from Texas: Margaret LaMontagne and Sandy Kress."

"Kress, who was a Democratic activist in Dallas backing Michael Dukakis for president when I first met him, told me Tuesday the White House did not support even Kennedy's version of Straight A's because ‘to have a bloodbath on the House floor is not worth it’," wrote Novak on May 23, 2001, here http://www.texaseagle.org/...

But by July, Kress had left La Montagne/Spellings behind and earned a high-profile spread of his own in New Yorker magazine, thanks to writer Nicholas Lemann. In addition to sketching Kress’s history, Lemann cast Kress as Bush’s brain on education. Inscribed in "a flimsy little drugstore notebook, green, maybe four by six inches" was a text by Kress dated 1999 and called ‘A Draft Position for George W. Bush on K-12 Education’." It was this draft, apparently, that led to Kress’s "temporary assignment as the White House's chief lobbyist on education."

Here’s a sample of the guru’s amazing composition: "Unhappily, after spending billions and billions of dollars on education, the federal government has made virtually no meaningful difference in helping educate our children. As a result of this cynical, shameful, and wasteful behavior, other politicians have decided that there should be no federal role in education at all. Our citizenry, which regularly says that education is the nation's most important cause, needs to understand the sharp contrast between Governor Bush's vigor and the utter sloppiness of the keepers of the status quo."

If anyone could lead Bush’s crusade into education, it would be Kress, who, in addition to being "former president of the Dallas School Board and one of the architects of the Texas education reforms, is a Democrat, but he and Bush had been working together successfully for years."

"Sandy Kress's notebook lays out the essentials of the Texas education reform," Lemann writes. It’s not rocket science: State-adopted standards feed into state-adopted tests, with scores "used to rate the performance of schools." The magic, Lemann understates, was in the marketing: "the promise to ‘leave no child behind’ and to eschew ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’." And Kress was the perfect marketer for the purpose, as Lemann describes here:

In the early stages of the Presidential campaign, I watched Gore, in Dallas, make a speech on education to a group of African-American mayors, in which he tried, without much evident conviction, to cast Bush's record on education in a bad light. Sandy Kress was there to run an after-the-speech spin room for the Bush campaign, which entailed publicly opposing the Presidential candidate of his own party. The intense loyalty of Bush's close aides can be startling -- is there something there that they see and we don't, or do we see Bush more clearly from a distance than they do up close? In one of my conversations with Kress, when he was talking about an early Bush maneuver on behalf of the bill -- nothing terribly unusual, just chatting up some members of Congress -- a wave of emotion came over him and, with a murmured apology, he started to cry.

Kress won his victory, sure enough. Without ever convening a hearing on the bill, the House passed it 384 to 45. "The last thing the White House wanted was a long, slow period of national debate in which the many interest groups involved in education could marshal lobbying campaigns," Lemann explains. In the Senate, progress was slower, getting snagged on the consequences to schools whose scores didn’t measure up. Kress’s solution reflected Kress’s power in Bush’s world: "One Saturday afternoon, word spread instantaneously within this group (while the world slumbered on): Sandy Kress had just rewritten the A.Y.P. formula," Lemann says.

Just like that.

WHEN JOHN DiIULIO DITCHED the White House’s Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, Time magazine’s James Carney wrote that Washington watchers wondered why Kress hadn’t done the same already. But Kress was a different animal altogether, Carney observed here http://www.time.com/... "Not only is Sandy Kress a Democrat, but he's also the lead negotiator and chief policymaker for Bush's education-reform plan. Together with his faith-based initiative, education reform undergirded Bush's claim to be a compassionate conservative. Like DiIulio, Kress was chosen because Bush hoped his Democratic credentials would attract bipartisan support. In Kress's case, it worked. But after the education-reform bill clears Congress, expected next month, Kress will pack his bags. Kress will at least be able to claim victory when he leaves."

And it came to pass, as reporter Diana Jean Schemo wrote here

http://listserv.arizona.edu/... on December 18: "The Senate overwhelmingly approved a bill today that would dramatically extend the federal role in public education, mandating annual testing of children in Grades 3 to 8, providing tutoring for children in persistently failing schools and setting a 12-year timetable for closing chronic gaps in student achievement. The 87-to-10 vote capped a tumultuous year for the bill that began with President Bush's postinaugural unveiling of his education plan, [and] continued through a springtime of wrangling over issues like how student progress would be measured..."

Kress himself, Schemo writes, "watched the vote from the Senate gallery, as did Education Secretary Rod Paige."

Communications show pattern of meddling in ‘Reading First.’

Interesting reading in EdWeek, particularly on way US Dept. of Ed. tried to lean on Klein to adopt phonics-based curricula – to little avail. See sections esp. in bold below.

Published: February 20, 2007

E-Mails Reveal Federal Reach Over Reading

Communications show pattern of meddling in ‘Reading First.’

By Kathleen Kennedy Manzo

The Reading First initiative’s rigorous requirements have earned it a reputation as the most prescriptive federal grant program in education. Now, an Education Week review of hundreds of e-mail exchanges details a pattern of federal interference that skirted legal prohibitions.

In the midst of carrying out the $1 billion-a-year program, which is part of the No Child Left Behind Act, federal officials:

• Worked to undermine the literacy plan of the nation’s largest school system;

• Pressured several states to reject certain reading programs and assessments that were initially approved under their Reading First plans;

• Rallied influential politicians, political advisers, and appointees to ensure that state schools chiefs stayed on track with program mandates; and

• Pressed one state superintendent to withdraw grant funding from a district that demoted a principal in a participating school.

In regular e-mail discussions, Christopher J. Doherty, the Reading First director at the U.S. Department of Education until last September, and G. Reid Lyon, a branch chief at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development until June 2005 and an influential adviser to the initiative, closely monitored states’ progress in applying for Reading First money, in issuing subgrants to districts, and in complying with the law’s provisions for scientifically based instruction. They also worked out strategies for intervening where they deemed more federal control was warranted.

“We ding people all the time in Reading First,” Mr. Doherty wrote in March 2005, after he pressured Illinois education leaders to pull funding from a district. “We don’t like to do it, of course, but we do it because otherwise RF turns to crap and means nothing, just another funding stream to do whatever it is you were going to do anyway.”

Some former federal officials and supporters of the program argue that such oversight was essential to its success, but a number of state and local officials took offense and questioned whether Reading First staff members exceeded their authority. Some policy experts say they came close to doing so.

“That’s an unprecedented level of interference,” said Christopher T. Cross, a policy consultant for Cross & Joftus LLC in Danville, Calif. Mr. Cross helped write the ban against federal intervention in curriculum and instruction into the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in the 1970s and later served as an assistant secretary in the Education Department under President George H.W. Bush.

The language was left in when the law was reauthorized as the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001. It states that federal employees are prohibited from exercising “any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system.”

“The intention when that language was put into the statute,” Mr. Cross said, “was that these were decisions that had to be made at the local level in connection with local standards. I think there’s no question what went on [in Reading First] is right on the border of crossing the line on that provision.”

Showdown in Rockford

A highly critical report issued by the Education Department’s inspector general last fall concluded that federal officials may have overstepped their authority in crafting the strict requirements. Inspector General John P. Higgins Jr. also said those officials seemed to favor a particular instructional method while discrediting others. ("Scathing Report Casts Cloud Over ‘Reading First’," Oct. 4, 2006.)

The crass and sometimes vulgar e-mail exchanges that underpinned the inspector general’s findings stunned many educators and policymakers. The findings led to a shakeup in the department’s Reading First office.

But advocates of the program, and allies of Mr. Doherty, protested that the report was overblown and had unfairly selected sensational e-mails to paint a dedicated and effective employee as a rogue operator within the department. The e-mail record, however, shows Mr. Doherty’s aggressive and arrogant tone repeated in messages to Mr. Lyon and other colleagues.

The e-mails were obtained by Education Week and a complainant in a case against the Department of Education through the Freedom of Information Act.

E-mail Excerpts

I am going to review all my [Indiana] files on Monday. Having done no subgrants yet, it may be hard to make something stick, but if they are trying to go soft with the requirements, they are just as good a candidate as any other state to show them/the rest that RF is NOT just another federal reading program that can be flouted.
—Reading First Director Christopher J. Doherty to G. Reid Lyon, a branch chief for the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, citing concerns that Indiana officials may not be taking Reading First requirements seriously enough, March 2, 2003

Monitoring will be key as usual. They will game the system if they can. They think they have already done everything and are getting the RF bucks to shine shit. How strong should I be with respect to guidance at the highest state level. I will meet with Gov. [Kathleen] Sebelius in the morning. How detailed should I be with respect to the shortcomings.
—Mr. Lyon to Mr. Doherty regarding Kansas’ Reading First program, April 16, 2003

I have been in good, regular touch with Everett Barnes, pres. Of RMC Research Corp., which does both [Reading First Technical Assistance] and some [Comprehensive] Center work, too re: the Shaywitz report and I am very happy to learn that you find it scathing and clear in its conclusions/recommendations. Not happy that NYC is doing something this bad, of course, just glad that the report is not the usual equivocating ‘On the one hand,..but on the other…’ kind of stuff.…this is not a ‘dueling experts’ kind of thing. This has the Flat Earth Society on one side and people who own/understand globes on the other.
—Mr. Doherty to Mr. Lyon, referring to a review of New York City’s literacy plan, Aug. 29, 2003

Confidentially: …Well, I spoke to [a New Jersey official] with a roomful of others on their end and they are HALTING the funding of Rigby and, while we were at it, Wright Group. They STOPPED the districts who wanted to use those programs. We won in Maine, we won in New Jersey. Morale is sky high across the country. State plans have gone from–on average–crap, to each one being–at least on paper–strong and aligned with [scientifically based reading research], and we have lots of monitoring muscle to flex and [technical assistance] brains to provide. Strong law, great funding, solid, guiding science. We are winning.
—Mr. Doherty to Mr. Lyon, in reference to the rejection of reading textbooks that they viewed as not meeting federal requirements, Sept. 5, 2003

Just got off the phone (again) with Randy Dunn. He confirms that [Illinois] has frozen Rockford’s RF remainder of $638,633 and we are working on finalizing this together. Please, close hold. There are/will be be consequences for Rockford’s idiocy. And kids, unfortunately, are paying for the decisions of adults, again.
—Mr. Doherty to Mr. Lyon, Feb. 15, 2005

SOURCE: National Institutes of Health

Some state and local officials said they felt bullied by Mr. Doherty. One such case played out in Rockford, Ill., in early 2005, after federal officials received e-mail messages about a principal at a Reading First school there. The principal was reassigned after battling with district officials over reading instruction at Lewis Lemon Elementary School. The new superintendent, Dennis Thompson, and district director of instruction Martha Hayes wanted the school to supplement its direct-instruction model with more varied reading selections and writing activities after determining that students weren’t being prepared for the more rigorous coursework of the later grades.

The principal received help from a local supporter of the National Right to Read Foundation, which promotes phonics instruction. Robert W. Sweet Jr., then an influential senior analyst with the education committee of the U.S. House of Representatives and the founder of the NRRF, asked Mr. Lyon to look into the matter. Mr. Lyon corresponded with Mr. Doherty, a direct-instruction advocate, about the need to apply pressure to state leaders in Illinois.

In March of 2005, after numerous telephone discussions and a meeting with state schools Superintendent Randy Dunn, Mr. Doherty sent a letter to the state, expressing his dissatisfaction with Illinois’ implementation of the grant. Mr. Doherty cited the Rockford case and the state’s hiring of an employee for the Reading First program who he thought did not subscribe to scientifically based reading research. He informed Mr. Dunn that the state was being “designated in need of corrective action,” and would be subject to additional monitoring, consequently risking the loss of millions of dollars in future grant funding.

“Clearly, there were issues of program compliance in Rockford, and we were working to address them,” said Mr. Dunn, the state schools chief until last month. “But the situation with the principal there had given a great entree to the feds to start wielding a heavy hand. They took an opportunity with a situation that was kind of separate from the Reading First program to get ahold of us, the state, directly by the throat.”

Mr. Thompson, the district chief, said the issue was a personnel matter, unrelated to Reading First. He said he wasn’t even aware that federal officials were involved and kept apprised of the situation in Rockford until informed by Education Week.

Mr. Doherty and Mr. Lyon e-mailed each other repeatedly about the situation, sometimes in response to Mr. Sweet’s queries. They expressed outrage at what appeared to them to be mistreatment of the principal and district officials’ undermining of the direct-instruction program with “their ill-fated wrong turn to balanced literacy.”

Although “balanced literacy” is viewed by many educators as an approach incorporating a variety of skills- and literature-based reading methods, it is considered code for “whole language” by Mr. Doherty and others pushing more explicit and systematic instruction.

The field of reading instruction has been marked for decades by disputes over the best approach to teaching reading—generally speaking, a phonics-based vs. a literature-based approach. Over the past decade, a consensus has emerged that a combination of approaches is best, although there is still considerable debate over how much skills instruction is needed.

In response to Mr. Doherty’s demands, Illinois tried to send a monitoring team to investigate Rockford’s Reading First program. Mr. Thompson refused to cooperate with the state officials and federal consultants who visited, saying the short notice would have disrupted schools’ operations. Mr. Doherty then directed the state to freeze the district’s funding, and ultimately to withdraw the grant. Those actions prompted another e-mail from Mr. Lyon: “wow – Talk about a guy with smarts, integrity AND balls,” he wrote. “I am talking about you Chris.”

The principal at Lewis Lemon Elementary sued the district. District officials said a settlement was reached in the case, but could not discuss the details.

“They made all these judgments about us when they knew absolutely nothing about what we were doing,” said Mr. Thompson, who added that he was perplexed how the revisions to the reading plan could be perceived as whole language. “We ended up getting into a war of labels.”

Mr. Doherty would not comment for this story. Sandi Jacobs, who helped administer Reading First as a senior program specialist with the Education Department, said she and Mr. Doherty believed that the Rockford district was “severely and significantly out of compliance.” They then pressed state officials to deal with the matter.

New York Story

In New York City, federal officials jumped into the fray over reading instruction months before the state even applied for Reading First money. When city Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein unveiled his plans for a districtwide literacy framework in January 2003, his action drew criticism from a number of reading experts, who argued that a highly structured, phonics-based program would serve students better than the literature- and writing-based plan.

Rod Paige, the U.S. secretary of education at the time, asked Mr. Lyon to help city officials in understanding the research on effective instruction, according to an account of the events Mr. Lyon sent in an e-mail to a prominent reading researcher. A group of researchers associated with the NICHD, Mr. Lyon’s agency, then wrote a letter to Mr. Klein detailing why they believed his “balanced literacy” program was not sufficiently research-based. The researchers subsequently met with Deputy Chancellor Diana Lam and other district officials to discuss their evaluation.

“New York City was a big concern, and legitimately so,” Mr. Lyon said in an interview this month. “If you put in place a new program that changes the rules, and you have a city like New York get the money and flout the rules, then everyone else would want to do the same thing.”

After district officials added a stronger phonics text, one of the researchers involved in the review told Education Week she considered it a sound instructional approach. ("N.Y.C. Hangs Tough Over Maverick Curriculum," Oct. 15, 2003.)

Balanced Literacy Rebuffed

But later in 2003, as New York state was negotiating with federal officials over its final Reading First plan, federal officials and consultants took another stab at persuading city officials to take a different tack on reading instruction.

In the interview, Mr. Lyon said state officials requested guidance on how New York City could meet Reading First criteria. Sally Shaywitz, a Yale University professor and a member of the National Reading Panel—a congressionally mandated committee that issued an influential 2000 report on reading research—and two other researchers conducted the review.

Mr. Lyon helped arrange for those researchers to meet with Chancellor Klein to outline their findings and discuss how the city’s schools could benefit from a commercial core program for reading, instead of the customized framework the city had crafted.

A federal contractor for Reading First oversaw the review and recommended that a task force, consisting of Ms. Shaywitz and other key researchers, be appointed to help the district choose an appropriate program.

Mr. Lyon regularly checked in with Mr. Doherty of Reading First to ask, “Can you brief me on the status of the NYC RF application as I am getting Qs from higher.” The request continued: “Did they do the right thing?” Later, Mr. Lyon indicated that there was “WH interest.”

The former NICHD branch chief, who managed the $120 million grant program for reading research at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., asked another researcher, an author of the Open Court commercial reading curriculum, to help him make the case for a structured, comprehensive core program. Mr. Lyon said he sought advice from the researcher, Marilyn Adams, because of her long-standing reputation in reading research. He did not consider her link to Open Court a conflict of interest because her commitment was to the research first. “I need good data fast,” Mr. Lyon wrote to Ms. Adams in August 2003, after describing Mr. Klein’s reluctance to adopt “an evidence based program like Open Court” because of the mixed results of the program in other big cities, and the alternative approaches being used in Boston and San Diego. “I think he will listen if we can show gains from evidence based programs.”

Mr. Lyon also acknowledges in the e-mail that the text was just one of the essential components, “teachers and implementation being as important.”

In e-mails to Margaret Spellings, who was President Bush’s chief domestic-policy adviser before becoming education secretary, Mr. Lyon discusses “NY City,” according to the subject line. All but one line was redacted under an exemption in the federal freedom-of-information law that considers pending decisions to be confidential. In the end, Mr. Lyon asks, “Let me know if you want me to do anything.”

In sharing the message with Mr. Doherty, Mr. Lyon commented: “Gees – this never stops – we have to win this one.”

When the Education Department inspector general’s report was released, now-Secretary Spellings said that the problems cited “reflected individual mistakes.” But at least one former Education Department official has suggested that Ms. Spellings was deeply involved in the program while working at the White House.

“She micromanaged the implementation of Reading First from her West Wing office,” Michael J. Petrilli, who worked in the department from 2001 to 2005, under Secretary Paige and Secretary Spellings, wrote in the National Review Online last fall. “She was the leading cheerleader for an aggressive approach.”

Mr. Petrilli, now a vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington think tank, has argued that Mr. Doherty did what officials in the White House and Congress expected him to do.

Ms. Spellings has not responded to the allegations about her role. The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment last week.

New York state was awarded it’s Reading First grant in September 2003. In the end, New York City relented and chose a commercial reading program—Harcourt Trophies—for its 49 Reading First schools, but stuck with the balanced-literacy program to guide reading instruction at other schools.

The 1.1 million-student district’s Reading First funding is considered vulnerable because the inspector general found its grant application should not have been approved, and recommended that the state take back its $107 million grant.

Chancellor Klein would not comment for this article. But in a August 2003 interview with The New York Times, he said: “I think it’s a ‘less filling/tastes great’ debate. I don’t believe curriculums are the key to education. I believe teachers are.”

Fingerprints Elsewhere

Many other Reading First details large and small came to the attention of Mr. Lyon and Mr. Doherty between 2003 and 2005, which they discussed by e-mail. Mr. Lyon also visited states to provide guidance on Reading First.

In March 2003, for example, he agreed to meet with a handful of Indiana legislators who requested his advice on ways to ensure that state officials adhered to Reading First mandates. Mr. Lyon suggested the state would need extra monitoring because of the potential for noncompliance, which could send a message to other states of the consequences of not adhering to the requirements. The legislators had suggested to Mr. Lyon that state education officials in Indiana were not ready to abandon its existing reading approach.

After meeting with officials in Louisiana and North Carolina, Mr. Lyon told Mr. Doherty that they needed to discuss various issues of concern, including the assessments and consultants that the states were planning to use under their Reading First grants. The two federal officials discussed Louisiana’s desire to use an assessment for Reading First schools that they did not deem research-based, and Mr. Lyon suggested to a North Carolina administrator that a textbook by a well-known reading researcher was inappropriate for use in Reading First training sessions.

Local educators, researchers, community leaders, or parents alerted them to some issues.

One New Jersey parent asked Mr. Lyon for help in July 2003, because state officials were allowing the use of a Wright Group reading program, owned by the McGraw-Hill Cos. She didn’t consider the text research-based. Mr. Lyon alerted Mr. Doherty. The Reading First director recalled that “we forced Maine to drop the bad program.” By September 2003, nearly a year after New Jersey’s grant had been approved, New Jersey officials disallowed funding for the text.

“As you may remember, RF got Maine to UNDO its already made decision to have Rigby be one of their two approved core programs (Ha, ha – Rigby as a CORE program? When pigs fly!) We also as you may recall, got NJ to stop its districts from using Rigby (and the Wright Group, btw) and are doing the same in Mississippi,” Mr. Doherty wrote in October 2003. “This is for your FYI, as I think this program-bashing is best done off or under the major radar screens.”

In May 2005, Harcourt Achieve Inc., which owns the Rigby Literacy program, issued a press release outlining changes it made to the program to ensure it aligned more closely with research. The changes were prompted, the company said, by deficiencies that were brought to light by the Reading First grant reviews.

And when a Texas consultant informed Mr. Lyon and Mr. Doherty of breaches in that state’s Reading First program by the interim state commissioner of education, they debated in a series of e-mail exchanges with a researcher how best to get state officials back in line. They discussed getting influential advisers to the Bush administration, and federal officials with Texas ties, to put pressure on the state education department.

Hypervigilance Defended

By many accounts, Mr. Doherty, a former director of a Baltimore-based organization that oversees direct-instruction reading, was a tireless leader for the program. Reading First, which has the support of many educators, was intended to bring research-based instruction to the nation’s underperforming schools. Mr. Doherty and Ms. Jacobs were essentially the only staff members assigned full time to the program.

Many state officials rallied to his defense when the inspector general’s report was released last fall. Reading First recently received the highest performance rating of all NCLB programs from the White House Office of Management and Budget.

“It’s not that Reading First was over the top,” Ms. Jacobs said. “It’s much more that many programs [administered by the Education Department] are severely undermonitored.”

Sol Stern, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and an outspoken critic of New York City’s reading plan, also defends the hard-line approach.

“If Doherty’s sin was to lean on a state education agency or two to promote a reading program backed by science over one that wasn’t, well, that’s just what the Reading First legislation intended,” Mr. Stern, wrote in the Winter 2007 edition of City Journal, the institute’s magazine.

Mr. Lyon, who is designing a teacher-preparation program for the Dallas-based Best Associates, said this month that the “hypervigilant monitoring” was necessary, but that he did not anticipate how the Reading First mandates would be complicated by the issue of local control.

“Here you have local control, which historically has always been there, and then you have Reading First being very prescriptive,” he said.

“In my mind, Reading First has to carry the day,” he added.

‘Shameful Behavior’

Critics, other observers, and some stakeholders alike, however, say the results do not necessarily justify the heavy-handed management. Some vendors claim their reading programs were not given a fair shake. The nonprofit Success for All program, for example, has lost business under the federal initiative, according to founder Robert E. Slavin, despite its extensive research and documented results. Many of the e-mail documents were obtained recently by Mr. Slavin from the National Institutes of Health, more than 18 months after he submitted the request.

Some of the commercial programs that have been widely adopted by Reading First schools did not have any more evidence of effectiveness than others that were not as successful.

“The law said nothing about picking specific programs, it just indicated scientifically based programs. But when we looked at the other programs that were being approved, we saw very little evidence that those were more scientific than the ones we were trying to use,” said Gene Wilhoit, who as state superintendent in Kentucky sent letters of complaint to the Education Department questioning the pressure his agency received to reject certain reading programs and assessments.

Mr. Wilhoit, now the executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, said, “We didn’t feel like [the federal oversight] was just an attempt to hold onto the integrity of the program.”

Susan B. Neuman, who helped roll out the program as the Education Department’s assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, agrees. Some of the e-mails were also shared with Ms. Neuman, and in a few of the exchanges, Mr. Doherty indicated he was relaying Ms. Neuman’s views on how the program should be carried out.

But in one e-mail to her, Mr. Doherty suggests that she should not be involved in the talks over state applications and implementation. Ms. Neuman, who left the department in January 2003, has said that she was left out of many discussions with state officials.

“They far exceeded their mandate,” she said in an interview, referring to Mr. Doherty and other federal officials. “We wanted to figure out ways that we could make Reading First a more powerful intervention [than previous federal programs], but certainly not in micromanaging school districts.”

“In the beginning,” Ms. Neuman added, “this was an honest effort to make something better, … but this is shameful behavior.”

Vol. 26, Issue 24, Pages 1,18

The problem is that the federal government did not really do a good job of researching what really works for teaching reading. Now they say all reading programs must follow what their report says is "research based". There are many books and reports written by educational researchers that have shown how the so-called research was not done correctly. The truth is the government looked at very little research to come up with their results. Most of what they say students need was based on research of learning disabled students.

The government has now been pushing a phonics only approach to the teaching of reading. Yes, students of course need phonics, but they also need to understand what they are reading. It is amazing how many children can read the words, but are not able to put it all together to understand what they are reading. As a pretty good reader myself, I was surprised to find out as a teacher, that many children can read almost fluently, but can NOT tell you anything about what they just read. It takes more than just phonics to read.

Balanced literacy is suppose to teach BOTH phonics and comprehension. What we need to talk about here in NYC is HOW balanced literacy was introduced to the system. Most districts implement balanced literacy over a 4 or 5 year period as it takes time for teachers to really learn how to teach this way. That was not done here in NYC. That is the reason Carmen Farina wanted time for staff development. Klein did away with it.
Lisa

Balanced literacy was forced---literally forced--on teachers in San Diego over a four-five year period of Tony Alvarado. Teachers had ample professional development, where they were told it was the only method that would be permitted. Teachers who did not comply were penalized by a variety of petty administrative punishments (e.g. being shifted arbitrarily to another grade or school). San Diego saw the same pattern we now see in NYC. A bump up in 4th grade scores (no greater, though, than the gains in the rest of the state), flat scores in 8th grade, no effect then or later in high school. Unfortunately in the monomaniacal focus on balanced literacy (and a lesser focus on math), they (Alvarado and Alan Bersin) completely forgot about history, science, anything else. At the time they started their program (on which Klein modeled his), San Diego was already a whole language district with better demographics than other cities.

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