$2 million for DC’s Voyager literacy program was earmarked

When Congress decided to appropriate $2 million in fall 2001 to help Washington, DC, kindergartners and first-graders learn to read, city school officials were told the money could be spent only on the Voyager Expanded Learning literacy program, a new product with virtually no track record. They had just picked a different reading curriculum, and “we didn’t want to be guinea pigs,” recalled Mary Gill, then the system’s chief academic officer.

School leaders did not know that the $2 million was an earmark that had been guided into law by Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) just after she had received more than $30,000 in campaign contributions at a fundraiser held by Voyager’s founder and chairman. Landrieu, as the ranking Democrat and chairwoman of the Senate’s DC appropriations subcommittee until early this year, was a pivotal figure in school spending and policy issues. With the Voyager earmark, she intruded on a curriculum decision normally made by teachers, principals, administrators and educational advisers. Read more in The Washington Post.