Although a recent government audit that revealed ethically questionable practices within the federal education program Reading First makes several references to current and former University employees, University officials said the connections do not implicate the institution.
The audit, released Sept. 22 by the Office of the Inspector General, reports that U.S. Department of Education officials improperly awarded federal reading education grants to some states.
According to the report, former University employees corresponded with the former Reading First director, Chris Doherty, whose ethics the audit calls into question. The report does not, however, indicate that University employees acted in an improper manner.
In 2002, former faculty member Edward Kame’enui and professor emeritus Douglas Carnine exchanged e-mails with Doherty about a review of reading assessments conducted by the University’s Institute for the Development of Educational Achievement, according to the audit.
Doherty, who resigned in advance of the audit, “inappropriately intervened” to release the resulting report, according to the audit.
Michael Bullis, dean of the College of Education, said it is expected that the University would be involved in important projects such as Reading First.
“It is very logical, given our leadership in educational research, particularly in literacy,” he said. “There is no question that our work has shaped public policy, legislation and affected the lives of hundreds of thousands of kids.”
However, it is incorrect to conclude that there was something improper done through the University and its faculty related to the program, he said.
“The report really focuses on transgressions at the Department of Education, not at the University of Oregon,” University spokesman Phil Weiler said. “The results of this audit do not reflect on the quality of research that has been done here at the University of Oregon.”
Some of that research led to the development of curricula used in the Reading First program.
A component of the No Child Left Behind Act, Reading First provides states with funding that they use to implement reading curricula in their schools.
The federal government funds “technical assistance centers” across the nation to help states develop reading curricula, including one at the University. The centers develop states’ proposals for Reading First grants and help them implement the programs, Bullis said.
States must use programs that are scientifically based and meet criteria laid out in a 2000 report commissioned by the Clinton administration, said David Chard, a professor and associate dean at the College of Education.
As part of Reading First, the Oregon Department of Education set up a review of several reading programs called “A Consumer’s Guide to Evaluating a Core Reading Program,” which Chard described as a consumer’s digest of reading programs.
The guide, written by Kame’enui and University faculty member Deborah C. Simmons, was designed to give schools information about different programs, some of which were co-authored by other University professors.
One such program, “Reading Mastery,” was developed at the University, Chard said.
Bullis said the College of Education is frequently commissioned to do reports such as the “Consumer’s Guide” and that it is up to the federal government to decide how to use the reports.
“We have been doing work like this for more than 35 years,” Bullis said. “We have not gotten competitive research dollars over that time because we weren’t good. Folks here know more about conducting applied research in education and social services than any place in the world.”
The inspector general’s report references the use of the “Consumer’s Guide” in other states, such as Nevada. Chard said many states either wrote their own guides or simply used Oregon’s.
Programs funded by Reading First must include five components as part of the curriculum. They must teach “phonemic awareness” – the ability to hear different sounds within a word and know that changing those sounds changes the word – as well as phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension, Chard said.
Many of the reading programs funded by Reading First are based on a method called “direct instruction.” The idea behind direct instruction is that teachers should clearly model what they want students to do or know and then practice it with the students, Chard said.
The method was first developed at the University of Illinois in the 1970s by professor Siegfried Engelmann, who later came to the University and used the method to develop commercially available programs, Chard said. The method was later used in a project funded by the Lyndon B. Johnson administration that was designed to help kids in the Head Start program benefit once they started school.
Despite evidence showing direct instruction to be the best method of teaching children to read, it was not always popular with educators, Chard said. At the time that direct instruction was developed, schools primarily taught reading through a system called “whole language.” The theory behind whole language was that learning to read is like learning to talk. If students were exposed to enough literature, the system posited, they would eventually learn to read, Chard said.
“Education has not historically been led by evidence, in particular because educational research is perennially under-funded,” he said.
In the 1990s, government studies showed that children do need systematic reading curricula, such as those that use direct instruction. Reading First is designed to leverage schools to use these approaches and to identify practices that are supported by evidence, meaning that direct instruction curricula are recommended by the federal government, Chard said.
“I think of it sort of like a freeway, and we’re giving them an on-ramp onto the reading freeway,” he said.
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