(no subject)
Oct. 5th, 2006 09:08 am
Oct. 5th, 2006
(no subject)
Oct. 5th, 2006 04:26 pm"They are trying to crash our party and we need to beat the shit 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," - Reading First program director, Chris Doherty, vowing to deny funding to programs not run by Republican insiders.
The Republican party: Where $4.8 billion to fund children's reading programs means $4.8 billion that you can funnel into the pockets of your supporters, without ever attempting to deliver an effective solution to the problem.
The Republican party: Where $4.8 billion to fund children's reading programs means $4.8 billion that you can funnel into the pockets of your supporters, without ever attempting to deliver an effective solution to the problem.
Department officials and a small group of influential contractors have strong-armed states and local districts into adopting a small group of unproved textbooks and reading programs with almost no peer-reviewed research behind them. The commercial interests behind those textbooks and programs have paid royalties and consulting fees to the key Reading First contractors, who also served as consultants for states seeking grants and chaired the panels approving the grants. Both the architect of Reading First and former education secretary Roderick R. Paige have gone to work for the owner of one of those programs, who is also a top Bush fundraiser.Conflict of what? You want me to stop stealing and maybe do my job honestly? JESUS! JESUS! FOR THE CHIIIIIILDRUUUUUUN! You're oppressing me because you hate God!
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In his internal e-mails, Doherty frequently admitted using "extralegal" tactics to force states and local districts to do the department's bidding...the vast majority of the 4,800 Reading First schools have now adopted one of the five or six top-selling commercial textbooks, even though none of them has been evaluated in a peer-reviewed study against a control group.
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"They kept denying it, but everybody knew the department had a list," said Jady Johnson, director of the Reading Recovery Council of North America. "They're forcing schools to spend millions on ineffective programs."
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When Reid Lyon, who designed Reading First, complained that a whole-language proponent had received an invitation to participate on an evaluation panel, a top department official replied: "We can't un-invite her. Just make sure she is on a panel with one of our barracuda types."
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For example, the company that developed Voyager Passport was valued at about $5 million in a newspaper article before Reading First; founder Randy Best, whose Republican fundraising made him a Bush Pioneer, eventually sold it for $380 million. He then put Lyon and Paige on his payroll.
