BeyondChron: San Francisco's Online Alternative Daily
School Beat: the Scandals of NCLB
by Lisa Schiff, 2007-03-01
Other than its very existence, one of the biggest scandals regarding No
Child Left Behind (NCLB), our federal education legislation, has been the
Reading First program. Reading First is another one of NCLB's typically
myopic efforts to improve educational outcomes. In this instance, the
approach has been to promote mechanical solutions to the development of
literacy skills for K through 3rd graders through programs based on
"evidence-based research" and "scientific data."
Having a sound basis for using a certain method makes sense, but the
absolute reliance on the ability to describe outcomes quantitatively is
suspect, since meaningful assessments of literacy skills require more than
that. As with some other programs NCLB has introduced, such as
supplementary tutoring, a primary purpose of the Reading First component
seems to have been to create a fast-track to funnel state dollars used to
purchase literacy education materials into the coffers of just a few
producers of those same materials. Language such as "scientific" and
"evidenced-based" simply served to provide the authoritative cover under
which to hide this intention.
Many might argue that since NCLB is sufficiently scandalous in the way it
reduces education to standardized curricula and tests, narrows the
subjects taught and the pedagogical methods employed that there is no need
to look further. While there is a certain truth to this, the flagrant and
sustained corruption that occurred with Reading First is particularly
important to expose. The impropriety not only clearly breached ethical
norms, it serves as a clear example of the privatization goals of NCLB and
of the underlying philosophy that profit making is of greater importance
than educating our society's kids.
The Reading First debacle, though making few headlines outside of
education circles, has come to the fore again as the Department of
Education (DOE) has had its internal affairs exposed in two recent high
profile publications. The first was in the report by the Commission on
NCLB, which amid all the recommendations for even more standardized
testing and tracking of teachers gave a pro forma hand slapping to the DOE
and called for more measures to prevent internal bias from occurring in
the future (http://www.nclbcommission.org).
The Office of the Inspector General, interestingly enough a unit within
the DOE itself, is the entity responsible for the second publication,
released just last week
(http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oig/auditreports/a03g0006.pdf). This
report has received less attention than the Commission's report, perhaps
because of its more narrow focus on malfeasance as opposed to the more
"forward-looking" reauthorization.
Despite the lack of notoriety and its in-house nature, this document is
surprisingly strong in formally identifying the problems with the Reading
First program and the dangerous terrain that NCLB has landed the education
community in with this push towards profit-oriented solutions to education
needs. While it does not question the underlying premises of the Reading
First approach, its attention to the inappropriate implementation of the
program is still important.
The OIG report is the result of an audit the office conducted reviewing a
series of workshops for state implementers (called Reading Leadership
Academies or RLAs), handbooks provided at those workshops, participant
surveys, analysis of email messages regarding the organizing of the
workshops and similar programs, and the degree to which the DOE complied
with required efforts to reduce and eliminate potential bias by promoting
any given vendor of educational materials and services. The report
includes the findings, evidence in support of those findings,
recommendations, DOE responses to the findings and recommendations
(usually objecting to the findings), and OIG responses.
Three major findings, accompanied by recommendations, came out of the
above analysis, most of which the DOE objected to, but to which the OIG
provided evidence-based (note the irony) rebuttals, often citing the text
of DOE originated email messages and evaluations from participants.
First, the OIG found that the workshops intentionally or otherwise
promoted just a few specific programs (Direct Instruction and Open Court)
by including participants who exclusively used those programs on panels
throughout the series of RLAs despite feedback from participants that it
appeared as though a sales job was in progress. We know of course now that
that indeed was the case and that Direct Instruction and Open Court
programs have been widely adopted despite the fact that there are other
programs to choose from, not to mention the many concerns over their
respective approaches and quality.
Second, the materials provided at the RLAs appeared to encourage the use
of one particular assessment tool, the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early
Literacy Skills Assessment (DIBELS) by profiling it in an extensive
article, contrary to the requirement that no particular materials should
be recommended. Finally, and not surprisingly, the OIG found that the DOE
insufficiently tried (if at all it seems), to prevent bias and conflicts
of interest in identifying experts to provide technical assistance at
events related to Reading First.
Learning the details regarding how kids and the programs that serve them
have been manipulated once again is always discouraging. But in this case
we may have some cause for hope as the OIA findings and the impressive
evidence they were able to pull together in support of those findings may
mean that not everyone at the DOE is on the profit-making, NCLB bandwagon.
Smoking guns are hard to come by these days, and the OIG has handed public
education supporters a few. This is more evidence that NCLB is not really
about prioritizing the education of our nation's children, evidence that
we can use in our efforts to transform or replace NCLB with national
education policy that actually has the welfare of children as its core
intent. After all, there is a greater purpose here than profits.
Lisa Schiff is the parent of two children who attend McKinley Elementary
School in the San Francisco Unified School District and is a member of the
board of directors of Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco
(http://www.ppssf.org).