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From washingtonpost.com :
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 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.
In one e-mail, director Chris Doherty told a staff member to come down hard on a company he didn't support, according to the report released yesterday by the department's inspector general.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings pledged to swiftly adopt all the audit's recommendations.
She also pledged a review of every Reading First grant her agency has approved.
Reading First aims to help young children read through scientifically proven programs, and the department considers it a jewel of No Child Left Behind, Bush's education law.
Spellings said the problems happened in the early days of the program, which began in 2002, before she was secretary.
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Posted on September 24, 2006 11:21 PM
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