No Cronies Left Behind

[Doug]

Billion-dollar reading program receives scathing federal audit
By BEN FELLER - AP Education Writer - 9/23/06
WASHINGTON — A scorching internal review of the Bush administration’s billion-dollar-a-year reading program says the Education Department ignored the law and ethical standards to steer money how it wanted.

The government audit is unsparing in its view that the Reading First program has been beset by conflicts of interest and willful mismanagement. It suggests the department broke the law by trying to dictate which curriculum schools must use.

It also depicts a program in which review panels were stacked with people who shared the director’s views, and in which only favored publishers of reading curricula could get money.

In one e-mail, the director told a staff member to come down hard on a company he didn’t support, according to the report released Friday by the department’s inspector general.

‘‘They are trying to crash our party and we need to beat the (expletive deleted) out of them in front of all the other would-be party crashers who are standing on the front lawn waiting to see how we welcome these dirtbags,’’ the program director wrote, the report says.

Read the rest here.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

I'm with Molly Ivins - if you're going to keep using the cute little moppets for photo-ops, quit messing with their reading program.