In Part 15, found here http://www.diatribune.com/... and here http://www.dailykos.com/... , we watched as an Inspector General’s report peeled back layer after layer of corruption, cronyism and federal law-skirting – even law-breaking? – by the administrators of Reading First, the presumed intellectual cornerstone of No Child Left Behind. As we observed in that chapter, this pattern of bending, breaking and replacing federal law will personal preferences should ring familiar to former White House education advisor Sandy Kress, who broke and replaced Lyndon Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act with NCLB for George W. Bush, just before leaving public service to collect substantial earnings from the global lobbying powerhouse Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.

In Part 14, found here http://www.diatribune.com/... and here http://www.dailykos.com/... , we reviewed the first half of the Inspector General’s final report of its investigation of Reading First, the presumed intellectual cornerstone of No Child Left Behind. Rather than finding that children were learning to read, however, the Inspector General found that Reading First administrators were learning to break and replace federal law with their own preferences. The pattern should ring familiar to former White House education advisor Sandy Kress, who broke and replaced Lyndon Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act with NCLB for George W. Bush, just before leaving public service to collect substantial earnings from the global lobbying powerhouse Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.

In Part 10, found here http://www.dailykos.com/... and here http://www.diatribune.com/... , reporters Andrew Brownstein and Travis Hicks turned our attention to Doug Carnine, the former reading-researcher and long-ago student of Ed Kame’enui, who would later become U.S. Commissioner of Special Education. Spotting a lucrative opportunity in the years-long debate between "phonics" and "whole language" reading curricula, Carnine developed "Reading First," which became a billion-dollar industry of its own under former White House senior education advisor Sandy Kress’s re-write of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), now known as No Child Left Behind. Carnine certainly benefited from his "Reading First" initiative by following George W. Bush from Texas to the White House and having his program sewn into the fabric of NCLB. If he has benefited materially from NCLB otherwise, he won’t have been the only one.