In Part 16, found here http://www.diatribune.com/... and here http://www.dailykos.com/... , we reviewed the Inspector General’s straightforward recommendations to eliminate corruption found in administration of the Reading First program, the presumed intellectual cornerstone of Sandy Kress’s No Child Left Behind. Those recommendations were given response by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, who wholly agreed with them, and did so twice in writing, but who also balked at the details of the IG’s findings, and who oddly threw former Secretary of Education Rod Paige and former Reading First Director Chris Doherty under the bus, pre-emptively absolving herself of any responsibility for the mess.
Of course, Kress is so far removed today from his role in drafting NCLB and Reading First – busy as he is directing corporate clients to the many spigots flowing with federal funds he designed in the law – that no one, including Spellings, gave a second thought to him in their remarks.
(To review the series from the beginning, click here http://www.diatribune.com/... or here http://www.dailykos.com/... ).
Spellings’s quickness and ease at casting Paige and Doherty as the culprits behind the multi-billion-dollar Reading First debacle is striking. According to reporter Sam Dillon’s account in the New York Times, found here http://www.nytimes.com/... , Spellings said in a statement, "Some of the actions taken by department officials and described in the inspector general’s report reflect individual mistakes. Although these events occurred before I became secretary of education, I am concerned about these actions and committed to addressing and resolving them."
That statement deserves to be considered in its parts. "Some of the actions taken by department officials and described in the inspector general’s report reflect individual mistakes," she says. So only SOME of the actions described by the Inspector General were wrong, for lack of a better word, but not all of them. This suggests yet another subtle dig at the detailed findings of the IG’s report. And, even so, she seems to suggest, any bad actions found by the IG were merely "individual mistakes," the fault of the decision-makers, and not really reflective of the program itself. Both of these assertions, if we interpret them correctly, are questionable because of the depth and breadth of the IG’s study of federal law, applied to the Reading First program in its review of corruption allegations, and because Reading First administrators were given such absolute authority over the administration of the program. In fact, if we read the IG’s report accurately, only one entity had greater power to oversee or approve the work of Reading First Director Doherty, and that was Secretary Margaret Spellings herself.
Which make the second half of her statement of absolution doubly strange: "Although these events occurred before I became secretary of education, I am concerned about these actions and committed to addressing and resolving them." The average reader of Sam Dillon’s article in the New York Times might predictably interpret this to mean that Spellings, who began her transition to succeed former Secretary Paige in November 2004, as reported here http://www.cnn.com/... , was unfamiliar with Reading First and its administrators, its policies, its role in Sandy Kress’s No Child Left Behind, its problems, or even the complaints made against it. Readers might be led to believe that for two and a half years, Spellings has really had no awareness of the program at all, and has only recently been made aware of its existence because of the IG’s scathing review of the corruption found there. Her comment makes clear that all of these problems occurred in a program over which she had no jurisdiction until she became secretary, but that, as the new sheriff in town, she now intends to clean things up and set things straight.
As I said, that might be the interpretation of the average reader of Sam Dillon’s item in the New York Times.
But to the closer observer, Spellings’s statement may represent a new height (or depth?) in Bush-era creative evasion of reality-based circumstances. We’ve seen the pattern and principle in a few other significant examples: If the facts do not support the direction we’ve adopted, create facts that do.
So, as we asked at the conclusion of Part 16, what exactly was Spellings’s role in the history of Reading First and its Doherty debacle?
In fact, Margaret Spellings was intimately familiar with Reading First from its creation. We’ve already noted that Spellings worked hand-in-glove with her fellow Texan Sandy Kress to move Kress’s magnum opus through Congress in 2001. Facts suggest that if Kress and Spellings were Bush’s tag team to rewrite Lyndon Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), then Kress designed the financial framework that would hamstring school district budgets and open the floodgates to corporate profiteering, while Spellings drafted the intellectual cornerstone, the phonics-based curriculum requirements for reading, or Reading First.
Don’t take my word for it; ask Margaret Spellings herself, when she was still known as Margaret LaMontagne, speaking on behalf of then-Governor George W. Bush in the campaign of 2000, explaining Reading First to Margaret Warner of PBS on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer.
MARGARET WARNER: In poll after poll, Americans say improving the nation's schools is a priority issue for them. Not surprisingly, the presidential candidates are stressing education reform too. And yesterday, Texas Governor George W. Bush unveiled a new element in his education platform, a $5 billion, five-year plan to make sure every child learns to read by the end of the third grade. Bush calls his program "Reading First." It would spend $1 billion a year...
For more on Bush's plan, we're joined by Margaret LaMontagne, Governor Bush's education adviser...
Ms. LaMontagne, first of all give us a few more details on this plan. How many students? The handout from the campaign talked about 900,000 students. Is that the scope of the problem? Is that how many students can't read at the grade level in those grades? And would this fully address it?
MARGARET LaMONTAGNE, Bush Education Adviser: Well, that's a good estimate and a good start...
We've modeled this program after something the governor launched here beginning in '96... This is a plan that's developed on a successful model that we've used here in Texas.
...
From these statements we learn that, back in 2000, before the Bush organization took residency in Washington, it was LaMontagne/Spellings, not yet Sandy Kress, who was called Bush’s "education advisor," and LaMontagne/Spellings was, indeed, not only intimately familiar with Reading First and its structure, but she was Bush’s representative on the topic. Not even Karen Hughes, the celebrated communications wing of Team Bush, had so great a command of the program’s details and history, which apparently stretched back to 1996, the year that Bush and LaMontagne devised the "Texas Reading Initiative" and that the Clinton administration won passage of its Reading Excellence Act.
So versed was LaMontagne/Spellings in the details of Reading First that she was comfortable comparing it to the Clinton administration’s plan and, in fact, couching Reading First as part of a "greater reform package."
Read for yourself the exchange with Warner:
MARGARET WARNER: Okay. So Ms. LaMontagne, what is in the governor's plan that is above and beyond what has already been enacted?
MARGARET LaMONTAGNE: First, let me say from a little historical correction point of view, the governor launched the Texas [R]eading [I]nitiative in January of '96 and recognized and we have waged war on illiteracy in Texas...
...
I think the difference here -- and this, you know, hangs with the rest of the governor's proposal -- is that this is part of a greater reform package. That is, that you have to have measurement and accountability and consequences coupled with local control and then investments targeted to solving a particular problem. So I don't want to leave the impression that this is the stand-alone program because it does fit very much with the rest of the governor's proposal.
The entire interview transcript from March 29, 2000, is found here http://www.pbs.org/... , but we’ve seen clearly from these notes that LaMontagne/Spellings was probably the person in the Bush organization with the most familiarity with Reading First.
Researchers Cecil Miskel of the University of Michigan and Mengli Song of the American Institutes for Research drew similar conclusions in a fascinating report published in 2004. Interested in how large and small networks of policymakers interact throughout the development and passage of a piece of federal legislation, Miskel and Song found the passage of Reading First to suit their study perfectly. To use the old sausage-making analogy, they really were not interested in the sausage itself, but instead in the process by which the sausage was made – which makers were included and excluded and why, and how the choice of makers influenced the process. Their conclusions reinforce what we’ve learned in our series.
"We began with the assumption that major policy changes are typically made by powerful actors operating in relatively open issue networks. In regard to the Reading First legislation, however, we found a small clique of inside policy entrepreneurs who fashioned major changes in a short period. Upon recognizing this condition, we expanded the research purpose to describe the actions of this insider policy group," they write here http://epa.sagepub.com/... .
Miskel and Song identified what they call "an elite set of policy actors" which included LaMontagne/Spellings and Kress.
...
With the 2000 elections, a host of new elite policy actors entered or assumed new positions in the national reading policy arena. Not only was the president new, he brought a number of political and policy advisors from Texas. Margaret LaMontagne-Spellings became Head of the Domestic Policy Council. As then Governor Bush’s senior education advisor, she played key roles in establishing and promoting the Texas Reading Initiative.
Alexander "Sandy" Kress became the Senior Advisor to the President for Education. As a former member of the Dallas school board and a member of an Austin law firm, he supported the governor’s agenda of educational accountability. As the senior advisor, his principal job was working with Congress to start a process and to reach agreement on the president’s educational agenda (I-18). That is, he acted as the president’s primary lobbyist to Congress for the No Child Left Behind proposal.
Rod Paige became the Secretary of the Department of Education. As the superintendent of Houston Independent School District, Paige had made a major commitment to ensuring English literacy for all students and emphasized early phonics-based instruction.
Beth Ann Bryan became the Senior Advisor to the Secretary in March 2001. During 1995, she had served as the Education Policy Director for then Governor Bush, and subsequently worked as an advisor to the Governor’s Reading Business Council and served as the program director of the Family Literacy Initiative for Texas.
Miskel and Song effectively find a lie in Spellings’s assertion to Dillon of the New York Times that matters related to Reading First had been the purview of former Secretary Rod Paige.
...
According to media reports (Nakashima & Milbank, 2001; Sack, 2001; Scheiber, 2001), the Department of Education played a very limited role in either creating or lobbying for the Reading First legislation. A congressional staffer agreed, "This was a White House effort. It was not a department effort. They were called in to do some technical drafting, but no policy development" (I-21). Another congressional aide stated simply, "The Department of Education officials played a limited role in forming and passing Reading First" (I-23). The interview data offer two explanations for the department’s lack of involvement. First, senior Department of Education officials simply were not in place until after the legislative process was well under way (I-23). The Senate did not confirm the deputy secretary until late May...
With Sandy Kress admitting that Paige’s place was "on the periphery" and other Department operatives similarly sidelined, LaMontagne/Spellings herself was left waist-deep in the creation and passage of Reading First, even "controlling" the lobbying for it.
...
Second, while Kingdon (1995, p. 33) observes that, "Political appointees come and go, but the bureaucracy endures," the civil servants in the Department of Education were not active in developing the proposed legislation. Instead, political writers (e.g., Nakashima & Milbank, 2001; Sack, 2001; Scheiber, 2001) claimed LaMontagne-Spellings and other White House aides developed the education policies, and Kress negotiated the legislation with Congress. Moreover, Kress reportedly described Paige’s role as being "a little bit on the periphery." Nonetheless, an administration official explained that the Secretary’s involvement was important: The Secretary had a significant role to play. He was trying to put the department together. . . . As to the bill [ESEA], we met frequently. We talked about direction and strategy and he was in the midst of all those things. Because of feelings one way or the other, I was able to shape our project and what we were doing. And of course, he was involved many times with the President in thinking about these issues, too. So he had a clear role in the bill. (I-18) Both explanations indicate that the Department’s role was tightly constrained, and that the Texas political advisors—LaMontagne-Spellings and Kress—clearly controlled the President’s policies and lobbying for reading and the department’s role was limited.
Another insider equated Kress’s and LaMontagne/Spellings’s roles in passage of Reading First and called their roles "huge."
...
One insider, for example, maintained that without President Bush’s leadership, persistence, wisdom, and experience, the Reading First legislation would have never passed (I-18). Moreover, many policy actors noted the high visibility of the staff lobbyists for the administration. One Senate staffer, for example, remarked that Sandy Kress was "the president’s person" who helped Congress start acting by helping develop the House policy and to some extent, the Senate’s policy as well (I-22). A member of a school administrators’ group also observed that Sandy Kress and Margaret LaMontagne were "huge," and that Nina Rees also "has had an effect because all the conservatives know her, like her, and work well with her" (I-6).
Talking to congressional leaders on a regular basis to win passage of her program, LaMontagne/Spellings was one of an "insider group of five" or a "cohesive clique."
...
Both the president and his representatives had frequent interactions with the congressional members or their staffs. Margaret LaMontagne-Spellings, for example, talked constantly to Congressional members (I-18). In short, while we had an open-ended search for all influential actors, the network data confirm a small cadre of policy actors—an elite among the elite in the national reading policy arena. An insider group of five formed what Mazzoni (1991) called the leadership arena, or in network language, a cohesive clique, that played critical roles in passing Reading First.
...
In the case of Reading First, a number of idea champions or policy entrepreneurs certainly played a critical role in expediting the process through which the legislation was enacted. According to a congressional staffer, early in the process, White House policy advisors contacted the Republican staff of House Committee on Education and the Economy. They asked for two types of help: crafting a reading initiative based on the president’s campaign statements and getting the plan through the legislative process. The advisors indicated that the president wanted the legislation to be "tight" (I-23). The staff working on the legislative language recognized that "if we don’t address the details, there isn’t going to be any change" (I-14). As a committee staff member, Bob Sweet worked closely, almost daily, with Reid Lyon to build the legislation around the findings of a National Reading Panel Report (I-14).
And when time came to sell Reading First to the public, LaMontagne/Spellings was one of the handful of elites dispatched to the media.
...
During the winter and spring months of 2001, both the president and his advisors and members of Congress engaged in a variety of strategies to gain support for their favored positions in ESEA. They made extensive use of the media through news releases, press briefings, and radio (e.g., LaMontagne-Spellings on National Public Radio) and television (Kennedy on PBS NewsHour) appearances. The administration deployed a number of lobbyists, e.g., Calio, Kress, and LaMontagne-Spellings, to work with members of Congress (Lizza, 2001), and both the president and the vice president lobbied as well (Garrett, 2001).
...in the case of Reading First, a relatively small group of inside policymakers who, for the most part, were not seen as being highly prominent controlled its writing and enactment.
...
Offering a useful perspective on how policy ideas can gather strength over time, Polsby’s (1984) framework for policy innovation helps explain how a small circle of policymakers controlled the enactment of Reading First.
And Miskel and Song even found one "insider" who attributes Reading First to LaMontagne/Spellings wholesale, lock, stock and barrel, thanks to her leadership in passage of Bush’s Texas Reading Initiative in the mid-1990 and her adaptation of that plan for federal implementation.
...insiders and outsiders opined that the elapsed time between introducing Reading First and enacting the No Child Left Behind Act was short. From our perspective, the actual time of this policy innovation was not a single year, but several. Fundamental changes started in the mid-1990s, especially with the plethora of state-level actions and the REA. Reading First simply culminated a seven- or eight-year staging process for reading policy innovation. Paraphrasing Polsby’s (1984, p. 153) ideas to the current policy change, innovations pass through a stage of incubation, where political actors—senators and representatives, lobbyists, or other promoters—take the idea up, reshape it, adapt it to their political needs, publicize it, and put it into the ongoing culture of decision makers. Finally, in our interviews and reviews of the popular press, we found little fundamental and virtually no organized opposition to Reading First. As one interest group member said after the interview was completed, "we are giving him [The President] a free ride on this one." Another one acknowledged:
"I asked our guys in Texas how they felt about the reading initiative. They liked it. I figured that Margaret LaMontagne was going to do nationally what she had done in Texas. Our guys liked it; there wasn’t any use talking about it. (I-6)"
Therefore, we speculate that important contextual factors also contributed to the formation, influence, and effectiveness of the cozy club of inside leaders, e.g., traditional interests granted the new president a honeymoon period; the president’s and his staff’s experience, commitment to and success with reading policy in Texas; and the strong desire by congressional leaders to reverse their failures and actually reauthorize ESEA.
Finally, the folks over at SchoolsMatter hit this nail on the head within days of Spellings’s evasion of blame. "If there is a core claim that distinguishes every ED response to the emerging Reading First criminal conspiracy, it is that Margaret Spellings came on the scene long after most of the dastardly deeds were committed by Doherty, who has now been selected as the ‘Michael Brown’ to be sacrificed in this debacle," they write here http://schoolsmatter.blogspot.com/... . "Too bad that this core story line is another lie: Margaret LaMontagne (Spellings) was Bush's chief domestic policy advisor before she became Secretary of Education, and in 2000 she was spokesperson for Reading First and education advisor even before Bush was appointed President, when she and Lyon and Carnine's Oregon mafia built the infrastructure for the crackpot con game that would become the Reading First we now know about."
"For Spellings to deny innermost knowledge of what was going on at ED before she was promoted to Secretary is just as believable as any other lie emanating from the failed government in the White House," they conclude.
In addition to excerpting the PBS Newshour interview LaMontagne/Spellings gave to Margaret Warner in 2000, SchoolsMatter digs up further evidence that places LaMontagne/Spellings at the scene of the crime mere days before Bush’s inauguration, found here http://www.isbe.state.il.us/... .
Transition Team
President-elect Bush has appointed a 31-member advisory group to assist Secretary nominee Paige in his transition to USDE. The group is to provide input and related outreach for the policy coordination group appointed earlier. The group includes Lamar Alexander (former USDE Secretary), Norman Augustine (Lockheed Martin), Keith Bailey (Williams Companies), Frank Brogan (Lt. Gov. of Florida), John Chambers (Cisco Systems), Sharon Darling (national Center for Family Literacy), Williamson Evers (Hoover Institution), Chester Finn (Fordham Foundation), Floyd Flake (Edison Schools), Howard Fuller (Institute for the Transformation of Learning), Lisa Graham Keegan (Chief in Arizona), Gene Hickok (chief in Pennsylvania), Phyllis Hunter (Texas Reading Initiative), Robert King (State University of New York), Reid Lyon (NIH), Mitch Maidique (Florida International University), Bruno Manno (Annie E. Casey Foundation), John McKernan (former governor of Maine), Charles Miller (Meridian Advisors, Ltd.), Darla Moore (Rainwater, Inc.), Lynne Munson (American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy), Diana Natalicio (University of Texas-El Paso), Susan Neuman (Center for Improvement of Early Reading Achievement), Hugh Price (National Urban League), Diane Ravitch (New York University), Ed Rust (State Farm Insurance), Ted Sanders (Education Commission of the States), Andrew Sorenson (University of Alabama), Paul Vallas (Chicago Public Schools), Maris Vinovskis (University of Michigan) and Mark Yudof (University of Minnesota).
The policy experts named by Bush are: Margaret LaMontagne (Bush’s senior education advisor in Texas), who will direct the group; Sandy Kress (attorney and former president of the Dallas school board), as the chief adviser; William Hansen (Education Finance Council); Sarah Youssef (from the campaign, formerly with the Heritage Foundation); Christine Wolfe (staff of the House Education and Workforce Committee); Becky Campoverde (same); and Nina Shokraii Rees (Heritage Foundation).
What a crew.
(Thanks to SchoolsMatter for that head’s-up.)
But whither Sandy Kress? Has he retreated entirely to the private sector, driving his corporate clients to the full troughs and idling while they drink? Evidence suggests he hasn’t, or at least that he continues to do some hopscotching on behalf of his favorite statute, now being well-paid to solve problems that he was well-paid to create. What a guy.
We’ll catch up with what Kress has been doing this year, and with what is happening to his NCLB, in Part 18, so stay tuned.
And to review our progress, click these links, cross posted at Daily Kos and Diatribune:
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 1
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 2
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 3
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 4
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 5
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 6
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 7
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 8
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 9
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 10
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 11
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 12
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 13
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 14
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 15
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB, Part 16
http://www.diatribune.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...