The report is worth reading - if you need to be convinced of the extent of these individuals unethical behavior. It's very clear that in their capacity as advisors to federal, state and local education agencies, they tilted the field towards programs they helped to author, which were in turn sold by k-12’s dominant publishers and for which these author/advisors received very substantial royalties.
But, for the most part, it just provides more detail on matters we already understand (Download below.)
There are three important exceptions:
The first is how the report identifies specific instances where author/advisors were engaged with publishers' staff to influence policy. For example:
• Dr. Kame’ennui carried water for Pearson/Scott Foresman to Assistant for Elementary and Secondary Education Secretary Susan Neuman and, via email, subsequently pointed out to his contact at the publishing house that he had put “Pearson in a favorable position to exact influence” on her.
• In response to an offer by a representative of Houghton Mifflin to sponsor a trip by Dr. Carnine to Texas on reading standards Carnine asked his contact about what kinds of “ content (he) could or should present to support changes in the standards."
• Dr. Torgeson entered into a contract with SRA McGraw Hill for a grades 1-2 reading intervention program while he was under contract to the Department of Education to conduct a “through and objective” review of Reading First programs for Georgia, and subsequently helped that firm in the state.
The second exception is the insight offered by the report into the competition between the “old” and “new” education industry – a theme of some interest to your editor. A close reading suggests that our author/advisors not only favored publishers over taxpayers, they favored the old industry and its royalties over the new industry with its fixed-fee consulting contracts. In 2003, when Torgeson and Simmons decided they should resign from their positions on the Voyager program design team because it conflicted with their government responsibilities, the report describes Kame’ennui unique approach to resolving the problem.
Finally, in Voyager's defense, while the report reveals quite a few instances of authors/advisors' taking overt action on behalf of the publishing firms who are still compensating them in the form of royalties, there is no evidence of their acting on behalf of Voyager. That firm, sold to ProQuest in December 2004, may have simply be a victim of collateral damage from the investigation, tarred with the same brush as the publishers merely because it is a for-profit firm and had the bad luck to sign up these consultants. Maybe not, but so far there doesn't seem to be evidence suggesting Voyager did anything wrong, that they asked the authors/advisors to do anything on their behalf, or that the authors/advisors lifted a finger to help them.
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