States Pressed to Refashion Reading First Grant Designs

Documents Suggest Federal Interference

Evidence is mounting that federal employees and their agents may have directed or even pressured states to choose specific assessments, consultants, and the criteria for evaluating core reading programs as conditions for getting funding under the Reading First initiative, possibly in violation of federal law.

Education Week found such a pattern of behavior in an examination of thousands of pages of correspondence and official documentation obtained through open-records requests, as well as interviews with education officials across the country.

The close oversight of the $1 billion-a-year program has allowed a handful of commercial reading programs, assessments, and consultants to reap much of that money, while others have been shut out of the competition, according to documents and confirmation...