Reading Between the Lines (Page 4)

According to one panel member, there is a simple explanation for the discrepancy: Widmeyer Communications, the powerful Washington, DC, public relations firm hired by the government to promote the panel's work. Widmeyer had represented McGraw-Hill's flagship literacy product Open Court during the Texas literacy drive, and now it counts McGraw-Hill and the Business Roundtable among its most prominent clients. "They wrote the introduction to the final report," says NRP member Joanne Yatvin. "And they wrote the summary, and prepared the video, and did the press releases."

Yatvin remains frustrated with Widmeyer's influence over the panel--from stacking public hearings with alumni from Bush's Texas literacy drive, to minimizing the impact of her dissent by burying her minority report. Yatvin even recalls, with disgust, a Widmeyer flack getting in between her and a reporter (Scott Widmeyer, Widmeyer's CEO, denies that this happened). Other panel members echo Yatvin's concerns, although the NRP chair, Donald Langenberg, chancellor of the University System of Maryland, says the PR firm was "very nearly invisible" and insists the panel's reading recommendations were "balanced."

It has been phonics-based programs, however, that seem to have enjoyed a boost in the wake of the report. In Texas and California, McGraw-Hill literacy products have been adopted by school districts on the basis of their purported scientific validity. With the new education bill, Bush has tripled funding for early literacy, bumping it up to approximately $1 billion a year over the next six years. And he has just tapped Christopher Doherty to be in charge of spending that money. His qualifications? As head of the nonprofit Baltimore Curriculum Project, Doherty brought DISTAR--McGraw-Hill's other literacy product--to Baltimore's public schools. "The bill stresses that the federal government must focus in early reading on those programs that have been scientifically proven to be effective," Doherty told the Baltimore Sun. "My job will be to help identify those districts and states that show they are going to implement K-3 reading programs based on that scientific research."

Phonics and testing, we're meant to believe, are an intensive therapy set to turn around laggard schools. But administrators, teachers, parents and children know better; all are bracing for the changes wrought by the new legislation. In Oakland the school board wants to spend its money somewhere else, introducing a resolution calling for the district to "cease immediately funding any and all identified un-funded state mandated costs, including but not limited to state-mandated testing, assessment and evaluations." Roy Romer, the superintendent in Los Angeles, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "It's a good bill only if they fund it." Apprised that the increase would come to roughly 35 cents per student per day, he concluded, "It's just a bunch of new mandates."

If this sounds like a dodge by those afraid of accountability, why the suspicion among successful districts? Last May more than two-thirds of eighth graders in the affluent New York suburb of Scarsdale boycotted a new standardized test, protesting the dumbing down of the district's curriculum. Elizabeth Burmaster, recently elected Wisconsin's state superintendent of public instruction, finds the new legislation wasteful and redundant. "The money we have for public education is going to lowering class size," she says, pointing out that Wisconsin has worked hard to develop its own accountability system and that its students are perennially among the highest-scoring in the nation. "But the federal legislation basically says, 'Nope, you have to go back in and redo your state assessment system.' To what purpose?"

For the Bush Administration, passing the education bill may end up being the easy part. The public liked its emphasis on high expectations for schools and children (as opposed to the "soft bigotry of low expectations" attributed to bleeding-heart educators). A quasi-religious, and very American, faith in education helped the rhetoric of accountability to resonate; people half-consciously believe that schools ought to be able to equalize life opportunity, regardless of grinding poverty in one district, booming affluence in the next. But that disparity isn't going anywhere soon. The big players now at the education table, some with a considerable financial stake in the new regime, believe that money is best spent on testing and textbooks, rather than on introducing equity into the system over the long term. Meanwhile, thanks to a suave PR campaign, a large segment of the education community takes for granted that the science behind educational research is disinterested and rigorous. Both assumptions prevail in the current legislation; both need to be examined with clarity and skepticism in the years to come.

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