In Too Good to Last, Sol Stern eviscerates the bureaucrats, politicians and special interests who attacked Reading First, the successful federal program to fund effective reading programs and deny funding to losers.
Aggrieved whole-language program proprietors complained bitterly that their wares couldn’t be purchased with Reading First funds. They found a receptive ear in the Education Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG), a bastion of green eyeshade and Dragnet types who weren’t the least bit interested in children learning to read. The OIG launched a witch hunt against (RF director Christopher) Doherty, falsely claiming that he was improperly favoring particular publishers.
Doherty was forced out for doing the job he was hired to do, Stern writes.
Then the administration turned its back on Reading First, allowing the program to be gutted and starved of funding.
Low-income children were learning to read with the help of Reading First programs. Now those programs are struggling to survive.
I am sorry for sounding like a broken record in my posts, but why is anyone surprised by this report? This is your government and this is the way it works, er, doesn’t work. Government supports universities that have education schools with our tax dollars. Education schools actively work to undermine anything related to reading that does not adhere to the whole language mantra (or to any other nonsensical approach to teaching reading, see “learning styles”). Sandra Stotsky has correctly identified ed schools as the “shame of the nation.”
Teacher education schools (and government schools) have failed. Those of us who can get our kids out of these schools. Those of us who are interested in improving the reading skills of children get out of education schools if we can and take our talents for teaching the science of reading to teachers elsewhere.
IGs make recommendations only. If proper procurement/evaluation regs were followed, which are really tricky and require a lot of “CYA”, this probably would not have been a problem. It’s up to the discernment of the program heads to determine the validity of the IG’s findings and recommendations.