Bush Flunks Reading First Program

Posted by Cliff Schecter, Cliff Schecter's Blog at 4:01 AM on May 2, 2008.

They should have tried the program out on the Dunce in Chief first. If it could teach him to read, it could teach anyone:

President Bush’s $1 billion a year initiative to teach reading to low-income children has not helped improve their reading comprehension, according to a Department of Education report released on Thursday.

The program, known as Reading First, drew on some of Mr. Bush’s educational experiences as Texas governor, and at his insistence Congress included it in the federal No Child Left Behind legislation that passed by bipartisan majorities in 2001.

Wait… Bush had educational experiences? Who knew?

It has been a subject of dispute almost ever since, however, with the Bush administration and some state officials characterizing the program as beneficial for young students, and Congressional Democrats and federal investigators criticizing conflict of interest among its top advisers. […]

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and President Bush have consistently extolled Reading First as a highly effective program.

Yes, so effective that it hasn’t improved reading comprehension. Then again, comprehension isn’t one of Bush’s strong points, so there’s some logic there, albeit twisted.

Then there’s that whole cronyism thing. I’m sure Bush comprehends that just fine:

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the education committee, and who has long criticized the program, said, “The Bush administration has put cronyism first and the reading skills of our children last, and this report shows the disturbing consequences.”

In 2006, John Higgins, the department’s inspector general, reported that 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.

The Reading First director, Chris Doherty, resigned in 2006, days before the release of Mr. Higgins’s report, which disclosed a number of e-mail messages in which Mr. Doherty referred to contractors or educators who favored alternative curriculums seen as competitors to the Reading First approach as “dirtbags” who he said were “trying to crash our party.”

What a waste of a billion dollars. Just think of how many minutes of the Iraq War that could have bought them.

Tagged as: bush, education, no child left behind