by David Safier
Bush's Ed Department spent $6 billion on the Reading First program, with no results, according to the Ed Dept's own studies. Now the Reading First Advisory Panel says, the studies weren't comprehensive, so let's keep pouring money into a program that probably doesn't work, because we really think it'll work if we give it enough time.
This from the same conservatives who love to say you can't just "throw money" at education! I guess when they're handing education dollars over to their friends to spend with minimal oversight (the corruption in the Reading First funding was wide spread and well documented), that's just the invisible hand of the free market at work, so it's OK.
Apart from the pleasure the Bushies get from giving government money to friends, they love Reading First because the only reading programs funded by the $6 billion were the most rigid, drill-and-kill phonics programs they could find. Apparently, they saw no reason to fund any other programs. Why give money to people who think one of the ways to teach reading is to inspire a love of reading and literature in children? Damn hippies!
A professor emeritus at UA I met recently, Kenneth Goodman, spent a full half hour telling me about the horrors of the phonics program the Reading Firsters pushed. Interestingly, I saw a letter to Education Week by Goodman on the topic a few weeks ago. The gist of his letter is, if we spent the $6 billion trying out a number of approaches to teaching reading, we could actually compare results and know more about what works and what doesn't. But by putting all the money into one program, we learned nothing.
have you run the phonics program by the TUSD Raza Studies that has taught chicano superiority to students where I must push a prompt to talk in english?
Posted by: sheapenny | July 07, 2008 at 05:06 PM