This time it’s the the cornerstone program of No Child Left Behind, Reading First (via Benen, of course).
WASHINGTON – 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.
No pattern here. Nosir…
John Cole
And the guy issuing the report is stepping down.
Probably to avoid being waterboarded, now my GOP is dead set on making that the law of the land.
Pb
Self-serving political hacks funnel money to serve their own interests? What a shock! As far as I’m concerned, that’s their default behavior, their M.O., and if they do anything that appears remotely selfless or charitable, then that deserves looking into.
The Asshole Formerly Known as GOP4Me
We can’t let this traitor get off so easily. Send that man to Guantanamo; his treasonous disclosures have only emboldened our enemies, the terrorists and their allies in the Democrat party and the media. His tactics, in the words of John Ashcroft, “only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve.”
A criticism of the President in the midst of a war on Terror is objectively pro-terrorist. If anything, a trip to Gitmo is too good for these America-haters.
God bless America. And God protect our President and Commander-in-Chief, George W. Bush.
Zifnab
Are “Republican Education Innitative” and “Porksplotion” synonamous terms?
ThymeZone
Fixed.
The Asshole Formerly Known as GOP4Me
Yup. Dick’s come a long way from the Ford Administration days, when he was Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld’s assistant and mostly concerned himself with issues like White House plumbing and the kinds of salt shakers they used.
I guess it just shows the dangers inherent in promoting a man beyond his abilities.
neil
Hmm, doesn’t Neil Bush run a company which produces curricula? I wonder…
The Other Steve
Back in the early 1990s the Republicans were running around campaigning on eliminating the Department of Education. It must have been back in 1990 because I remember talking to the Librarian I worked for at the time about it. But I could swear that Newt Gingrich made it a center of his platform in 1994.
I think it’s a good idea, but for a different reason than Newt thought.
I’m pretty sick and tired of Republicans taking the low standards used in the backwards south, and pushing them on our schools in the north.
Eliminate the Department of Education now.
Eliminate No Child Left Behind now.
Tom Grey - Liberty Dad
The Other Steve is sort of correct — real conservatives wanted to dump the Dept. of Education. Possibly replace it with a federal voucher program.
But Ted Kennedy and the Dems wouldn’t have it. You do remember the botched education reform ALSO has Kennedy’s name on it, don’t you?
Big power for Big Gov’t for rich Republicans to get richer thru “gov’t service”. Big Gov’t is always a bigger problem with the other party in power — yet I don’t see many Dems favoring vouchers yet.
chopper
‘starve the beast’ in full effect.