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 Editorials | At Issue | September 2006 
Audit Finds US Education Dept. Missteps
 Ben Feller - Associated Press
Washington - A scorching internal review of the Bush administration's reading program says the Education Department ignored the law and ethical standards to steer money how it wanted.
The government audit is unsparing in its review of how Reading First, a billion-dollar program each year, that it says has been beset by conflicts of interest and willful mismanagement. It suggests the department broke the law by trying to dictate which curriculum schools must use.
It also depicts a program in which review panels were stacked with people who shared the director's views and in which only favored publishers of reading curricula could get money.
In one e-mail, the director told a staff member to come down hard on a company he didn't support, according to the report released Friday by the department's inspector general.
"They are trying to crash our party and we need to beat the (expletive deleted) 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," the Reading First director wrote, according to the report.
That official, Chris Doherty, is resigning in the coming days, department spokeswoman Katherine McLane said Friday. Asked if his quitting was in response to the report, she said only that Doherty is returning to the private sector after five years at the agency.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, in a statement, pledged to swiftly adopt all of the audit's recommendations. She also pledged a review of every Reading First grant.
"I am concerned about these actions and committed to addressing and resolving them," she said.
Reading First aims to help young children read through scientifically-proven programs, and the department considers it a jewel of No Child Left Behind, Bush's education law. Just this week, a separate review found that the effort is helping schools raise achievement.
But from the start, the program has also been dogged by accusations of impropriety, leading to several ongoing audits. The new report from the Office of Inspector General - an independent arm of the Education Department - calls into question basic matters of credibility.
When the department fails to follow the law and its own guidance, the report says, "it can only serve to undermine the public's confidence in the department."
The ranking Democrat on the House education committee was furious.
"They should fire everyone who was involved in this," said Rep. George Miller, D-Calif. "This was not an accident, this was not an oversight. This was an intentional effort to corrupt the process."
About 1,500 school districts have received $4.8 billion in Reading First grants.
Bush Administration Puts Cronies Ahead of Taxpayers and Schoolchildren
US House Democrats
Washington, DC - The Bush administration pushed local school districts across the country to use a reading curriculum that had been developed by a company with close political and financial ties to the administration despite concerns about the quality of the curriculum and despite the fact that, in some cases, states sought to use other curricula, according to the results of an independent government investigation released today. As a result, the investigation concluded that the Bush administration violated the No Child Left Behind federal education law.
Rep. George Miller (D-CA), the senior Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, said that the report shows that it's time for the Department of Education - which last year admitted that it had paid media commentators hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce covert propaganda - to clean house.
"Corrupt cronies at the Department of Education wasted taxpayer dollars on an inferior reading curriculum for kids that was developed by a company headed by a Bush friend and campaign contributor," said Miller. "Instead of putting children first, they chose to put their cronies first. Enough is enough. President Bush and Secretary Spellings must take responsibility and do a wholesale housecleaning at the Education Department."
"Everyone at the Department of Education who was involved in perpetrating this fraud on school districts should be fired - not suspended, not reassigned, not admonished, but fired. This was not an accident. This was a concerted effort to corrupt the process on behalf of partisan supporters, and taxpayers and schoolchildren are the ones who got harmed by it," said Miller.
The investigation, conducted by the Department of Education's Inspector General, found that the Department of Education made states' funding under the federal Reading First program contingent on their using a reading curriculum developed by McGraw-Hill, Inc. or one from a short list of commercial reading programs. The report concluded that the Department of Education had stacked peer review panels, ignored federal statutes, and manipulated state and local reading curriculum selection procedures to steer grants to its favored venders. More than $5 billion has been spent on Reading First since 2002.
McGraw-Hill's Chairman and CEO, Harold McGraw III, and its Chairman Emeritus, Harold McGraw Jr., contributed a total of over $23,000 to the Republican National Committee and to President Bush's campaigns between 1999 and 2006. The Bush and McGraw families have been personally and professionally close since the 1930's, according to published reports.
The scathing IG report was released just as another IG report, from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, concluded that HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson had instructed department employees to direct federal grants and contracts to organizations politically friendly to the Bush administration. And it comes one day after the New York Times reported that the Interior Department prevented four federal auditors from collecting royalties from oil companies that had been cheating US taxpayers. The Interior Department's Inspector General recently told Congress that "Simply stated, short of a crime, anything goes at the highest levels of the Department of the Interior."
"Department after department in the Bush administration is infested with corruption, and the American people are paying the price," said Miller. "The American people demand accountability and need a new direction so that their interests and not the corrupt interests are served by this government."
Miller urged the Republican leaders of the House Education and the Workforce Committee to hold immediate hearings into the findings of the IG report - but he said he did not hold out much hope that such hearings would be scheduled. Miller had previously requested a Government Accountability Office review of Reading First; that report is forthcoming.
"The Republican Congress is a giant rubber stamp for the administration. They always have been, and as long as they are in power, they always will be," said Miller. |
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