(NOT the Official) DIBELS Clearinghouse

By Gerald Bracey

The "THEY CAN HAVE ANY COLOR THEY WANT AS LONG AS IT'S BLACK" AWARD: OR "DOPING AND DUPING WITH DIBELS"
U. S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION'S READING FIRST PROGRAM

In his April, 2007 testimony before the House Education and Labor Committee the Department of Education's Inspector General announced he had turned his findings about improprieties in the Reading First program over to the Justice Department for further investigation. He would not elaborate.

Chris Doherty, former director of Reading First, the fall guy in the scandal (but deserving of his fate nonetheless), disagreed that anything was amiss. He told the committee, "A distorted story has been written over the past few months based on the worst possible interpretation of events that occurred during the first days of the Reading First Program. At the outset we took steps to avoid any conflicts of interest."

Really? On March 7, 2007, Paul Basken at Bloomberg News wrote "A $1 billion U. S. program to improve reading among grade-school children was led by officials with ties to publishers including McGraw-Hill and Pearson, a federal audit concluded." That’s $1 a year, Mr. Basken.

"Consultants and product developers hired by Pearson, McGraw-Hill and other textbook publishers served on the panels established by the federal Reading First program to decide which textbooks should be funded under the program, the U. S. Education Department's inspector-general said in the audit." Indeed, Edward Kame’enui, then at the University of Oregon sent an email to Pearson after a meeting with Susan Neuman, then an assistant secretary of education, saying "Pearson is in a favorable position to exact influence through Sandy Kress." Kress, an architect of NCLB and a Pearson lobbyist, attended the meeting with Neuman. Several Pearson officers also showed up. Pearson publishes Kame'enui's and Simmons's curriculum materials. (Title I Monitor, September 2005).

That,to me, pretty well defines conflict of interest. And then there's the case of Kentucky as reported by Kathleen Manzo in Education Week. "Starr Lewis, an associate state education commissioner in Kentucky told the committee that state officials felt pressured by Mr. Doherty to change their choice of assessments for participating schools, and later refused to follow his request to prohibit schools from using two commercial reading programs that were approved for use in those schools."

"Ms. Lewis noted that one of the consultants providing assistance during the grant-review process had financial ties to the assessment, the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, or DIBELS. Kentucky was asked to revise its Reading First grant proposals three times."

"We were repeatedly advised to replace our current assessment tool with DIBELS."

Did she say "financial ties?" Quite an understatement. The person with the ties would be DIBELS author, Roland Good, part of what one might call the University of Oregon Cabal, who told the committee that between 2003, when DIBELS hit the street, and 2006, he collected $1.3 million in royalties.

Kame'enui, another cabal member, told the committee that his royalties had grown each year under Reading First, reaching $150,000 in 2006. Kame'enui ran a technical assistance center that advised states applying for Reading First grants. Deborah Simmons, Oregon cabalist and technical adviser to states, too, said her royalties for curriculum materials she co-authored with Kame'enui were on a par with his.

All of this infuriated the New York Times, which editorialized: "The United States Department of Education has been rightfully drawn (but not yet quartered) in Congress for failing to prevent the kickbacks, payoffs and self-dealing recently uncovered in the student loan business. Now it turns out that the department also mismanaged the federal Reading First initiative. . . .The failures, laid out in scalding reports by both Congress and Education's inspector general, go back to the very beginning, when the Education Department created the panels that evaluate state reading programs. Those panels were immediately hobbled by a lack of transparency and documentation. Profit mongers who were eager to exploit ties to the program for gain were given plenty of room to do so. In a particularly egregious case, a senior Reading First official signed contracts with a textbook publisher while working for the program. He attended conferences and actually lobbied the government on one publisher’s behalf."

In all likelihood, "senior Reading First official" refers to Kame'enui and the publisher, Pearson Scott Foresman.