NY Times Article on Cindy Cupp

["PRISCILLA GUTIERREZ" <pgutpgut@msn.com>]

Thanks to Susan Ohanian for posting this on her announce listserv.  Cindy 
has been a tireless advocate for getting to the bottom of the Reading First 
scandal...

SAVANNAH, Ga.

Don?t be overly disarmed by Cindy Cupp?s Southern molasses.

?I?m just a little old peon down here in Savannah? is the way she describes 
herself and her company, which publishes reading kits for kindergarteners 
and first graders.

Yes, her business is small. Dr. Cupp, 57, and Ginger Douglass, her older 
sister, are the only employees, working out of a small warehouse on this 
city?s outskirts. Their profits have never topped $200,000.

But Dr. Cupp has proved to be a canny businesswoman; she sells her reading 
kits to 80 of Georgia?s 1,267 elementary schools. She has also emerged as 
something of a giant-killer. With relentless sleuthing, she has become one 
of several whistle-blowers who uncovered evidence of conflicts of interest 
and favoritism in the Bush administration?s $6 billion Reading First 
program.

The program, which was intended to ensure that all lower-income children 
learned to read, awarded grants to states to buy reading textbooks and 
tests. It turned out to be a bonanza for certain textbook publishers and 
authors. A half-dozen experts setting guidelines for which reading textbooks 
and tests could be purchased by schools were also the authors of textbooks 
and tests that ended up being used.

DR. CUPP?S complaints about the program helped propel an investigation by 
the inspector general for the United States Department of Education that has 
resulted in three reports condemning ?a lack of integrity and ethical 
values? in Reading First. The program?s director resigned in September. More 
reports are anticipated, and Representative George Miller, the ranking 
Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, likely to 
become its new chairman, has called for a criminal investigation.

Dr. Cupp is a self-described speedboat who spent 19 years teaching children 
and adults to read. At her company, Cupp Publishers, she visits Georgia 
schools demonstrating her reading kits, while her sister, a retired guidance 
counselor, packs them for shipping and handles the bookkeeping.

When the federal government enacted Reading First in 2002, Dr. Cupp thought 
her company would surely get a slice of the pie. After all, 90 percent of 
students in the schools that use her kits had learned to read by the end of 
first grade.

The federal program emphasized phonics ? mastering the sounds of letters and 
letter blends ? as opposed to what officials considered the mushiness of 
whole-language teaching, which emphasizes grasping meaning through good 
children?s literature. Dr. Cupp?s materials also emphasized phonics ? in 60 
stories centered on two caped turtles named Jack and Jilly.

That emphasis was on display one day recently in Marie Durrence?s 
kindergarten at the East Broad Street Elementary School here.

?Jack can see the man play,? Terrica Williams read, pride glinting through 
her bashful smile.

?Jack can see the man go, go, go,? Kiara Plummer chimed in.

Still, schools that used her materials found themselves frozen out of 
federal money. Dr. Cupp sought an explanation from a friend at the Georgia 
Department of Education, where Dr. Cupp was director of reading from 1996 to 
1999, and was told, she said, that any school listing her reading program 
?would not be funded.?

After the federal department repeatedly rejected their grant applications, 
Georgia officials concluded that ?this money is available if you follow the 
rulebook,? said Dana Tofig, communications director for the Georgia 
Education Department. Dr. Cupp?s reading program ?did not meet the 
benchmarks it had to meet,? he said, adding that the officials who could 
explain why no longer worked in the department.

Dr. Cupp points out that Georgia chose big textbook publishers, like Scott 
Foresman and Macmillan/McGraw-Hill, spurning what she called home-cooked 
turkey dinners like her reading program. She ended up losing contracts at 
about a half-dozen schools. Then, she said, by demanding files under 
Georgia?s open records law, she discovered that a national evaluator had 
never even looked at her program.

Dr. Cupp?s dealings with the Georgia Education Department are being examined 
by the federal inspector general. Mary Mitchelson, counsel for that office, 
said, ?We don?t talk about our pending work.? But Dr. Cupp is hoping to get 
some answers.

Others might have given up when they lost their contract, but Dr. Cupp said 
she has a strong inclination to resist injustice, rooted in a childhood 
shadowed by an alcoholic mother. She did not sheepishly accept her fate 
because she thought she deserved a place.

?We?re not all going to be Wal-Marts and K-Marts,? she said. ?I go to the 
hardware store down the street because I can walk in and say, ?Help me with 
this,? because I know the guy.? So she filed a complaint.

According to Robert E. Slavin, chairman of Success for All, a nonprofit 
publisher whose phonics-based program is used in 1,200 American schools and 
who also complained when 200 schools dropped his program in order to get 
federal money, Dr. Cupp got the ball rolling against Reading First. She 
?gave us an example and gave us some courage,? Mr. Slavin said.

Last December, federal inspectors came to Savannah, a city graced by sleepy 
squares and shaded by oak trees dripping with Spanish moss.

Dr. Cupp showed the investigators hundreds of documents she collected over 
three years that showed links between contractors hired by the federal 
government to evaluate school reading programs, and the writers of those 
programs. She also diagrammed these links. Her findings and those of others, 
including reporters for Education Week, found that consultants hired to help 
school districts apply for and run Reading First grants sometimes received 
hefty royalties from the very materials that schools were encouraged to buy.

For example, Dr. Cupp learned that a writer of a Scott Foresman reading 
textbook selected by schools in Georgia and other states was Edward 
Kame?enui, a professor on leave from the University of Oregon. Dr. Kame?enui 
headed a Reading First technical center in Oregon, one of three under 
contract that help state officials run Reading First programs. Dr. Slavin 
unearthed financial disclosure forms Dr. Kame?enui filed for 2005 and 2006 
showing that he earned between $100,000 and $250,000 a year from Scott 
Foresman?s parent company, Pearson.

Dr. Kame?enui is now commissioner of the National Center for Special 
Education Research, an arm of the federal Education Department.

CHAD COLBY, a spokesman at the department, said Dr. Kame?enui?s ?role at the 
department has nothing to do with Reading First anymore, so he?s not giving 
interviews.?

Dr. Henry L. Johnson, assistant secretary for elementary and secondary 
education, contends that the universe of science-based reading research is 
small and would include some textbook writers, but Dr. Cupp argues that it 
is not so small that blatant conflicts were inevitable.

?It?s like saying there are only six heart surgeons in the United States,? 
she said. Watchdogs like the Center for Education Policy think Reading First 
money has generally improved reading. Yet the center has also has found 
ethical problems with the way the program was run.

Dr. Cupp, a Republican by habit, sees an irony in the fact that an 
administration supposedly skeptical of Washington bureaucracies that dictate 
to local governments ended up creating one that did precisely that. She 
thinks the Reading First scandal ?will go down as the greatest flimflam in 
the history of education.? But she said what drove her was the sheer 
injustice of evaluators rejecting reading kits that she knew succeeded. Her 
life has been teaching children to read, and ?they were attacking my life.?

?The issue is not what reading program is good or bad but that the playing 
field wasn?t level, and schools lost their right of choice,? she said.

joeberg@nytimes.com


? Joe Berger
New York Times
2006-11-15





Priscilla Gutierrez
Outreach Specialist
New Mexico School for the Deaf

....change is inevitable, growth is optional...