No Crony Left Behind!
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.
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…
That official, Chris Doherty, is resigning in the coming days, department spokeswoman Katherine McLane said Friday. Asked if his quitting was in response to the report, she said only that Doherty is returning to the private sector after five years at the agency.
The audit found the department:
# Botched the way it picked a panel to review grant applications, raising questions over whether grants were approved as the law requires.
# Screened grant reviewers for conflicts of interest, but then failed to identify six who had a clear conflict based on their industry connections.
# Did not let states see the comments of experts who reviewed their applications.
# Required states to meet conditions that weren’t part of the law.
# Tried to downplay elements of the law it didn’t like when working with states.
If you have a program like Reading First that produces decent results — even when it’s run by the corrupt and greedy, imagine what you could achieve with old-fashioned management standards like honesty and integrity.
Posted: Sat - September 23, 2006 at 12:22 PM