Via Schools Matter, a link to this NYT editorial, Putting More Profit Before Education (quoted in full):

Published: May 19, 2007

The United States Department of Education has been rightfully drawn (but not yet quartered) in Congress for failing to prevent the kickbacks, payoffs and self-dealing recently uncovered in the student loan business. Now it turns out that the department also mismanaged the federal Reading First initiative, the cornerstone of the No Child Left Behind Act, which requires states to improve reading instruction in exchange for federal education dollars.

The failures, laid out in scalding reports by both Congress and Education’s inspector general, go back to the very beginning, when the Education Department created the panels that evaluate state reading programs. Those panels were immediately hobbled by a lack of transparency and documentation — and especially by the department’s failure to fully enforce conflict-of-interest policies. Profit mongers who were eager to exploit ties to the program for gain were given plenty of room to do so. In a particularly egregious case, a senior Reading First official signed contracts with a textbook publisher while working for the program. He attended conferences and actually lobbied the government on one publisher’s behalf.

Worse still, officials at the Education Department may have known about the conflicts and ignored them. As the word got around, some state and local officials naturally assumed that the federal government was more interested in shilling for favored book publishers than in improving reading instruction for the nation’s children.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings claims to have revamped this troubled program and to have made the conflict-of-interest rules crystal clear. But the only way to make sure that things have actually changed is for Congress to write the new rules and procedures into law.

I’ve been tracking the reading first story for a year and a half. There’s blame enough to be handed round to plenty of people besides Margaret Spellings, the main apologist for this mess.

Some questions that this editorial raises for me, are How clear is crystal clear? And How would that be any better than the wikipedia definition? And, finally, How cynical is it to say that a rewritten definition is “the only way to make sure” that things have changed?

What we need is an election, and an informed public.