After receiving the Reading First contracts, Best was able to sell his company, Voyager Expanded Learning, for $360 million. According to his critics, the company was valued at only $5 million a few years earlier, a figure Best disputes.
“At the time of the sale, the company that bought the program justified this to their stockholders on the basis that this program had done extremely well under Reading First and was very politically connected,” said Robert Slavin, a leading educator at Johns Hopkins University and critic of the Reading First program.
Slavin, the brother of an ABC News executive, says a program he developed was rejected by the Department of Education despite its record of success.
Best, of Dallas, denied his connections to President Bush helped him win any of the federal reading program contracts.
“I have gotten no help from anyone in the administration, and I’ve given more money to Democrats than Republicans,” Best told ABCNews.com.
But congressional investigators say Reading First contracts were awarded by the administration based on politics and financial ties, not merit.
“They designed it for their friends and cronies, and they ended up not designing the best program for America’s schoolchildren,” said Congressman George Miller, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee.
In a report earlier this year, the inspector general for the Department of Education found repeated instances of conflict of interest in the Reading First program.
And it resulted in more phonics instruction than instead of balanced literacy. Bad for taxpayers, bad for policy, good for Bushies.