Sandra Stotsky
Former Senior Associate Commissioner
Massachusetts Department of Education

October 8, 2006

As soon as the first stories appeared in the media in September about the Inspector General's report on Reading First, I sent letters or op-eds to a variety of newspapers in the country (New York Times, Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Washington Post, Washington Times, and the Los Angeles Times) attesting to the highly professional and positive relationship between the Massachusetts Department of Education and Chris Doherty, director of Reading First in the US Department of Education at the time it was being implemented in Massachusetts.I also noted that the attempt by Representative George Miller (D) of California to make a criminal case out of some seeming procedural violations in its implementation was not only an undeserved defamation of a conscientious public servant, but also a confused attack on the very essence of Reading First. Curiously, to my knowledge, only one of my many letters and op-eds has been published—a letter in the Boston Globe on October 8, 2006, in response to a letter from a school committee member in the town of Arlington who is critical of Doherty and Reading First's implementation in Massachusetts but presents no evidence to back up his charges.

The Inspector General's report on what it documents as procedural violations by the USED completely misses the intent of the legislation for Reading First—to promote use of research-based principles for reading instruction in teachers' professional development and in the materials they use in K-3.  As someone familiar with the large and consistent body of evidence from scientific research on reading instruction, I could fully appreciate and unhesitatingly support the specific criteria built into Reading First legislation and its implementation.Despite tremendous pressure from vendors of non-scientifically based programs and their friends, the USDE rightfully sought to promote the intent of the law in the advice it gave and the reviewers it chose.  

Doherty, who resigned two weeks ago, is the person chiefly responsible for the program's success.  His knowledge of reading and his guidance in keeping to the intent of the legislation were crucial to the program's success. Positive results are clearly visible in Massachusetts, as indicated in the June 2006 Reading First evaluation for participating Massachusetts schools. They are also visible in the country as a whole, as indicated in a recent report by the Center for Education Policy.
 
Nowhere does the Inspector General's report provide evidence that Doherty or the publishers of a research-based program called Direct Instruction made money from the USDE's implementation of Reading First.

The vast majority of Reading First schools in Massachusetts use the comprehensive programs published by three mainline publishers (Harcourt, Houghton Mifflin, and Scott Foresman), all of which were approved by the USED.None uses the supposedly favored DI program.

Nor does the Inspector General's report provide evidence that Reading Recovery, a major complainant behind the investigation, lost money.In Massachusetts, at least 13 Reading First schools use the non-scientifically based Reading Recovery intervention program, while other Title I, non-Reading First schools also use Reading Recovery.Moreover, like many other state legislatures, the Massachusetts legislature again voted for a separate line item in the state budget for Reading Recovery; increasing its allotment to 2.9 million dollars this past year.South Carolina's legislature targeted over $3,000,000 for Reading Recovery this past year.  And neither legislature has yet to ask for or undertake an independent evaluation of this program's long-term efficacy in the state. It's unlikely that other state legislatures require independent evaluations.

Reading First represents the first concerted--and bipartisan--effort by Congress to steer federal funds to reading instructional materials and to teachers' professional development in reading that reflect a scientific research base.  The initiative was designed to compensate for the failure of our schools of education to teach prospective and veteran elementary teachers how to teach reading effectively.  If Representative Miller's politically motivated pursuit of charges against the USDE results in an open door, when the reauthorization of NCLB comes up, for the very programs and practices that have clearly failed the nation's children for decades, the major beneficiaries will be those who have provided these unsound and very expensive programs and practices, not the low-income children who have just begun to benefit from the programs and practices Chris Doherty was helping to put into place.

Strangely, despite the role that Reading Recovery played in the Inspector General's investigation, I have not yet read newspaper accounts that include professional comments on Reading Recovery from independent reading researchers (see the attachment on Evidence-Based Research on Reading Recovery).Until we have more information on Reading Recovery's income, its sources of income, its influence on state legislatures and local school districts, and the role its friends played at the time the USDE and state departments of education were trying to apply the criteria embedded in the law to local school districts' choice of reading programs and assessment materials, we will lack an informed context for understanding the meaning and significance of the findings in forthcoming reports on Reading First by the Inspector General's Office.