Audit Finds Ethical Lapses In U.S. Reading Program - washingtonpost.com

Audit Finds Ethical Lapses In U.S. Reading Program - 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."

Independent, external peer review, to paraphrase Churchill, is the worst of all methods for selecting among proposals, except for all the other methods that are in use today. But even peer review doesn't lead to good decisions if you stack the review panels, if you unballence the playing field, or if you ignore the reviewer advice!