This is an amazing statement on so many levels. Read it and then your editor's comments:

The ''Reading First'' ruckus has resurfaced an old problem: misplaced Congressional faith in ''peer review.'' If it actually worked the way that chairman George Miller and a bunch of his colleagues say it should (i.e., an objective bunch of incredibly well credentialed know-nothings make decisions devoid of human judgment), then (a) no program funded by the federal government would ever change, whether it was highly effective or a waste of billions…

[W]ithout close oversight and energetic intervention, peer review of federal grant programs invites log-rolling and rewards status-quoism. Each hand washes the other; no risks get taken; nothing novel gets tried. The only folks ''qualified'' to participate earned that credential by working in and with the present system and sharing its beliefs; the only panels ''representative'' of a field are a hologram of the ways things are done today in that field; and the surest outcome of such panels' deliberations is to spread the money across the field's established interests. In primary reading, for example, a pure peer review panel would be exquisitely balanced between whole-language types and phonics proponents; would consist entirely of producers and pay no heed to consumers, and would dole out the dough accordingly. ''Reading science'' would have little to do with it.

When I was an assistant education secretary back in the late medieval period, I spent perhaps a third of my time selecting peer reviewers and panels that had a fighting chance of doing things differently, doing things right--and doing things the way I thought they should be done…. No doubt some will say I abused the peer process; I would say that I strove to protect the OERI's work from the most common forms of abuse.'' So far as I can tell, that's exactly what the much-abused Reading First team did, too. Hoorah for them. As a result, kids are reading better and NCLB can boast at least one effective program.

Chester E. Finn, "Table of treats", The Education Gadfly, May 10.

Comments:

1. This country rejected the strong-man, "doing things the way I thought they should be done" view of bureaucratic government a long time ago. There is the small matter of such American values as "the rule of law", "we are a nation of laws not men", and "no man is above the law."  Federal law, passed by the Congress and signed by the President, required the review panel to have a specific make-up. (See this week's New Education Economy®.) The Department flat out ignored the law.

There's a longstanding and well-tested principle in jurisprudence that contempt for one law breeds contempt for all law. Over at Justice, we had a set of rules for "National Security Letters" worked out by the courts that were simply ignored by the FBI. Over at the White House we had this quaint rule of "telling the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth" to a grand jury ignored by the Vice President's Chief of Staff  in the course of an investigation into the disclosure of a covert agent's identity. The situations at Education, Justice and the White House are different in degree, but not in kind. They are all about the arrogance of power. 

By endorsing disregard of the law at Education, Finn is implicity endorsing it everywhere in government. For if Education officials have to call the the shots on what's right in education, why not every official in government?

2. Even if one agrees with Finn on the specifics of Reading First policy and is happy with how the review panels worked out, the tactic is bad strategy. There will be other Adminstrations and other officials with other ideas, interests, personal weaknesses and axes to grind. The status quo players in k-12, that Finn seeks to overthrow, benefit from this because they are big enough to wait out any individual official or Administration that opposes them, and to rebuild whatever marginal loss they might have experienced when more favorable political conditions prevail. The rule of law defends the upstarts.

In this case, Congress laid out rules and a review panel aimed at protecting a new education industry trying to build a competitive advantage on results demonstrated by program evaluation. (Read Congressman Miller's opening remarks at the April 20 hearings.) Finn has railed so often against textbook publishers that it's pretty hard to fathom why he doesn't understand that he's simply bolstering their competitive advantage over programs that evaluation suggests might actually improve student performance.

3.  The whole second paragraph about how "without close oversight and energetic intervention, peer review of federal grant programs invites log-rolling and rewards status-quoism. Each hand washes the other; no risks get taken; nothing novel gets tried" is hard to reconcile with the outcome here. Before Reading First, the multinational publishers dominated sales of literacy texts. Afterwards, they won the overwhelming majority of Reading First sales. Chris Doherty wanted phonics to win out, his advisors were pro-phonics, his advisors got to push for textbooks they authored for the big textbook publishers. In retrospect, it's pretty clear that the panels represented producers, albeit by proxy, paid little head to consumers in the states, and doled out the dough accordingly. And since none of these textbooks has been subjected to any meaningful evaluation, its hard to see that reading science had much more to do with Reading First than mere assertion. Where's the novelty?

4. Finn's view of appropriate administrative procedure is, as he admits, based on a look back to "the late medieval period." In NCLB, Congress was looking forward - particularly in Reading First, to a market in school improvement based on program evaluation rather than asserted relationships to a general body of research. Your editor believes the panel should have been broadened to engage the private sector directly, but it was at least designed to account for expertise outside the Department of Education. (That may have been a reason why the Department ignored it.)

Up until NCLB's introduction of a market based on performance, the kind of bureaucratic politics practiced by Finn were completely acceptable. All of the "equities" distributed by federal education law were allocated to government agencies. In this respect, education policy was more like foreign policy. But as Congressman Miller recognized in his opening remarks, private providers have an equity stake in that program and NCLB. ("Rather than provide an even playing field on which high-quality programs could compete based just on the merits for business with the states, these officials and contractors created an uneven playing field that favored certain products.") The new distribution of equities should have changed how the Department managed the plan. Doherty, like Finn, had a medieval mindset and went about bureacratic business as usual. But private interests were harmed, they made a lot of noise, and the rule of law started its slow grind towards justice.

If we follow the path laid out in NCLB as written, Education will become less like the State Department and more like the Federal Trade Commission, and that's going to be very hard for medievalists - of the left and right.

 5. We all know it's too early to tell if the reason kids in elementary schools seem to be doing better in reading and literacy is  because of the materials funded through Reading First or something else. There hasn't been much in the way of controlled studies, and no one has really tried hard to isolate the value-added of the individual programs.

Bottom line: Reckless disregard of the law by government bureacrats, combined with willfull ignorance of their actions at the top, is hardly a sound basis for the regulation of an emerging industry. It is certainly no way to attract investment. In this country, the ends can never justify the means. Otherwise our government would soon not be much different from Russia's - and that's exactly where Finn's administrative law has taken Reading First. Attititudes like his towards law are one reason why investing in firms of the new education industry is not that much different from investing in new Russian oil firms - and why neither is a great magnet for investors' cash right now.

So, in the end, Finn's is not a very good paragraph to share with your investmment banker. Because if this is how Republicans view federal education policy, the prospects for an education industry based on performance rather than marketing are very poor indeed.