One of the greatest hypocrisies of No Child Left Behind since the beginning has been its “fourth pillar” of “local control and flexibility.” Federal involvement by its very nature is the antithesis of local control, and every school is being forced to show more concern for following the federal mandates than addressing the concerns of the parents whose children they are responsible to educate or risk losing their funding.

In fact, a study last year (PDF) found that 47 states were in “some stage of rebellion” agains No Child Left Behind with 21 states considering legislation critical of the act and 15 states, including Texas, considering legislation to opt out of No Child Left Behind altogether. True local control would lead to the rejection of this act in many communities.

Now the criticism is increasing. An internal review (PDF) from the Department of Education Office of Inspector General has found mismanagement of funds and a violation of legal and ethical standards in its Reading First grant program.

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 that the department broke the law by trying to dictate which curriculum schools must use. It also says that program review panels were stacked with people who shared the director’s views and that only favored publishers of reading curricula could get money. . . .

The audit found that the department:

• Botched the way it picked a panel to review grant applications, raising questions about 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 play down elements of the law it didn’t like when working with states.

– Associated Press

There are very few programs on the approved list for Reading First, leading to a de facto national curriculum in reading. There is nothing inherently wrong with these programs and many of them would lead to improvements over the current emphasis on the principles of progressive education which have led many of our schools away from teaching any basic skills explicitly. When I taught in Texas, I attended the First Grade Reading Inititiative trainings developed under then-Governor Bush and found the strategies excellent.

The difficulty comes with a federally mandated curriculum that has no flexibility to accommodate for the needs of individual students and school districts. The Department’s emphasis on direct instruction, the strategy favored by these questionable funds by former Reading First director Chris Doherty, is a perfect example of this. While this teaching model has shown good results on standardized tests, and has the advantage of delivering instruction in clear, explicit units, it allows no flexibility. The program is completely scripted and cannot be modified to meet individual needs.

I am not surprised that students taught with these models would perform better on any form of assessment than a child taught under the whole language model, but it does not mean that this model is superior to what it could become if good teachers were allowed more freedom to adapt the instruction to their own teaching styles and the needs of their students.