Bad News, Comrades: Reading Did Not Improve
President Bush and the Republicans are no better than the naive Great Society liberals of yesteryear in thinking that a new law and new government spending can accomplish glorious things here and abroad, and one of those programs was called Reading First and it generated billions in spending. Billions.
I swear that the propaganda for this program reads like stuff from the Soviet Union in the 1960s or something: "This program focuses on putting proven methods of early reading instruction in classrooms. Through Reading First, states and districts receive support to apply scientifically based reading research--and the proven instructional and assessment tools consistent with this research--to ensure that all children learn to read well by the end of third grade. ... Only programs that are founded on scientifically based reading research are eligible for funding through Reading First."
Well, two things. First, it turns out that it didn't work. The Department of Education--more more specifically, named in the tradition of Elena Ceausescu, the "Institute of Education Sciences"--released a report yesterday (I don't see it online but the NYT reports on it here) that says, well, the program didn't do a darn thing.
But, second, that doesn't mean there weren't winners. It turns out that the program was really a subsidy to certain GOP-connected publishers, and that is what scientific really means.. The NYT reports: "federal officials and private contractors with ties to publishers had advised educators in several states to buy reading materials for the Reading First program from those publishers." No details on precisely which publishers, but inquiring minds would like to know.
Two years ago, there was a big shake up in the program when it turned out that the director had send emails referring to other publishers of books as "dirtbags." The full email message: "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."
Now, that's some news: a federal program proves wasteful, morally hypocritical, ineffective, and corrupt. No comment yet from the "Assistant Secretary for Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development." That, however, should not stop you from consulting Laura Bush's approved reading list for children available on whitehouse.gov.
Comments (10)
Another federal program to engineer society fails. How shocking! Of course, this means that we need to spend more tax money to find out why it failed so that we can create more federal programs to fix the problems that the failed programs caused.
Published: May 2, 2008 10:21 AM
“Super Crunchers” by Ian Ayers has a great chapter on education in which he describes a program for teaching reading and math in early elementary called Direct Instruction, or DI. The program has 40 years of sound empirical research proving that it is the best instructional method. But after 40 years, only 1% of school systems have adopted it because it doesn’t mesh with the public school philosophy of education. By all means, let’s continue to use instructional methods that are proven failures.
Published: May 2, 2008 10:26 AM
Interesting. After my daughter's 3rd birthday, I started sitting down with her for a few minutes every day with a phonics reading book. In three weeks she was reading sentences well, she's 5 now and reading at a 5th grade level and doing 3rd grade math.
It doesn't take a village to raise a child, it takes _time_.
Published: May 2, 2008 3:57 PM
People are too busy digging holes and filling them back up to raise kids.
Published: May 2, 2008 7:58 PM
Public education is a joke. Something that important should never be taken away from the free-market.
Published: May 3, 2008 4:54 AM
Public education is a joke. Something that important should never be taken away from the free-market.
Published: May 3, 2008 4:59 AM
But it did work ... it transferred billions of dollars while creating government jobs at the local, state, and federal levels.
To the statist, this is proof of the success of Reading First.
Published: May 4, 2008 12:05 AM
Our basic problem here is that our great-grandfathers let the beast out of its cage. In fact, they embraced the concept that the stronger the beast and the longer its reach, the better. They forgot all about the warnings of the Founders (particularly the anti-Federalists and George Washington.) Now we are undone, and our children suffer for the folly of their forefathers.
Published: May 5, 2008 9:19 AM
People who have children should pay for their own children to go to school. It shouldn't come out of taxpayer dollars. If parents can't afford to send two or three children to school, they should have one or none. The rest of us should pay only for very poor children to go to school (as it's necessary to have an educated populace to maintain a democracy).
George Bush is the biggest Big Democrat we've had in office for years. Where's the party for fiscal conservatives? The Republicans are, too much, a bunch of religious nutters disparaging the Democrats for their tax-and-spend-ism, while doing a much better job at it themselves.
Published: May 7, 2008 4:49 AM
Amy, you had me right up until "The rest of us should pay..."
Published: May 7, 2008 11:43 AM