National Review: Hooked on Hysterics

April 19, 2007, 6:30 a.m.

Hooked on Hysterics
Reading First, politics second.

By Michael J. Petrilli


If you enjoy political theater of the absurd, tune in to a House Education and Labor committee hearing Friday on “Mismanagement and Conflicts of Interest in the Reading First Program.” There you will see a former Bush-administration official defending a highly prescriptive big-government program against one of the most liberal, big-government Democrats on Capitol Hill, who will, you can count on it, be demanding flexibility and freedom from big-government control.

This circus was set in motion on the campaign trail seven years ago. That’s when Governor George W. Bush proposed a heavy-handed federal program, modeled on a similar — and notably successful — one in Texas, that would provide mucho dinero for reading instruction, but only for interventions that were scientifically proven to work.

While this might have offended conservatives on federalist grounds, it made educational sense. Millions of children were failing to learn to read every year, primarily because of the public education monopoly’s fascination with “whole language” reading — the view that most children can learn to read “naturally” if they are simply surrounded by enough good books and given minimal guidance. A dizzying array of “reading programs” was in use, but almost none of the programs were working for the kids who needed help most. More than a third of the nation’s children were finishing fourth grade functionally illiterate, including two-thirds of all black and Hispanic students.

Meanwhile, the “scientific” approach to reading — the carefully designed, explicit instruction (including phonics and much more) found in so many high-performing inner-city Catholic schools — was getting great results. States that embraced this reading method — like Jeb Bush’s Florida — saw their minority students make dramatic gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Why shouldn’t every needy child get the good stuff?

The president spent much of his first nine months in office lobbying Congress for his reading plan, the centerpiece of his No Child Left Behind act. Famously, when the planes struck the Twin Towers, Bush was reading My Pet Goat to a classroom of Florida second graders as part of his persuasion campaign.

Congress went along, but not before making some fateful decisions. First, lawmakers watered down the requirements for eligible reading programs, partly because “proven” programs were scarce, and partly because the publishers of unproven programs were adroit lobbyists.

Second, bowing to “local control,” Congress left it to the states to decide which specific reading programs cut the mustard. It instructed the U.S. Department of Education to ensure that states chose wisely but complicated DOE’s efforts to do so by leaving untouched an older law that prohibits the feds from endorsing programs or dictating local decisions about curricula. “Tell them what to do but don’t tell them what to do” was the mixed message to executive-branch officials.

Fast-forward to tomorrow’s hearing, featuring the Education Department’s inspector general, who spent much of 2006 producing reports purporting to show that federal officials steered Reading First grants to preferred programs — those with which they had “professional associations.” Not that he presented any evidence of financial shenanigans — merely that a handful of the expert panelists reviewing the state applications were partial to certain reading approaches (specifically, those that work).

Another witness will be Chris Doherty, the former administration official who directed the Reading First program until he was made to walk the plank on behalf of his superiors last fall. His response to these “allegations” might as well be “guilty as charged.” He and his colleagues did exactly what they were expected to do. Federal officials did prevent states from using certain programs, programs not based on scientific research, and advised them how to look for better ones, just as Congress intended. That was the whole point.

Complicating matters, at least for those who want to crucify Doherty and impugn the Bush administration, is the success of the Reading First program itself. Whatever was done, it evidently worked for kids. Probably better than any federal education program in history. The Office of Management and Budget recently declared it the only “effective” No Child Left Behind program. A new report from the Government Accountability Office (not known to go easy on the executive branch) is filled with plaudits from state officials, who have seen their reading scores skyrocket. This creates a bit of a conundrum for committee chairman George Miller, one of the architects of No Child Left Behind, and thus of Reading First. His commitment to closing the achievement gap is well known (he’s even willing to spar with the teachers’ unions and education schools, a courageous quality in a liberal Democrat who must depend on them for donations). But so is his fealty to Speaker (and friend and fellow Californian) Nancy Pelosi. And this supposed “scandal” gives the Democrats a shot at another Bush-administration scalp.

Thus we arrive at today’s improbable events. If Miller chooses to attack Doherty and his former bosses, he’ll also be attacking the very sort of big-government program that his party instinctively supports. (And one of the few that is working!) A better use of his committee’s time would be to discuss the true choice that Congress needs to make (one they glossed over five years ago): Should the federal government be in the business of prescribing and proscribing curricula for the nation’s schools, and if so how? What are the pros and cons? But that sort of substantive deliberation, so important to the nation’s children, would be so much less entertaining.

— Michael J. Petrilli served in the Bush Administration in the U.S. Department of Education from 2001-2005. He is a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and a vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.


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