Right to Read: Lost in PR
Roberts, Wallace
Right to Read: Lost in PR by Wallace Roberts In 1970 the Nixon Administration began a campaign to eliminate illiteracy in the United States. The requisite press conference was called and...
...The following January, he appointed Donald Emery as executive director...
...Serving in Style In August, 1970, when the Center’s initial, $1.5-million grant was approved, Straley set out to hire a staff...
...Reflecting the J . Walter Thompson style of the Administration, Straley’s first step was to hire a public relations firm, which recommended the formation of a National Reading Council...
...Not one to make financial sacrifices to serve his country, Emery insisted on a $50,000-a-year contract with NRC plus retirement, health, and insurance benefits...
...Although the National Reading Center had an Office of Education grant, it had no program, no method, no theory, arid only the vaguest...
...The program “ had a clear goal-to eliminate illiteracy...
...A look at the squandered funds yields some interesting yet predictable insights into the Center’s priorities...
...Theoretically, the Council would set policy for the Center, but its real purpose was to give a star-studded, bipartisan allure to the program...
...But Allen realized that reorganizing existing programs under a new slogan would not be enough...
...After three years, the tangible accomplishments of the Right to Read program border on the nonexistent...
...Emery had been superintendent of schools in two of the nation’s most exclusive communities-Scarsdale, New York, and Shaker Heights, Ohio-receiving salaries commensurate with his employers’ tax base...
...While still formulating the program’s general outline, Allen began a series of discussions with Walter Straley, vice president for public relations at AT&T...
...Straley supported him, insisting to Office of Education officials that he had a valid contract...
...Holloway criticized the NRC’s latest budget proposal, focusing on the high salaries, extensive and costly use of consultants, and extravagant office expenses...
...Early in the summer, First Lady Pat Nixon was named honorary chairman...
...By this time, James Allen, the originator of the Right to Read program, was no longer Commissioner of Education...
...He bitterly criticized the Center’s “Ten Million Tutors” plan-the only specific program drawn up by the National Reading Center...
...The Office of Education already was overseeing remedial reading programs administered by state school systems...
...In addition, he brought with him a rental car which had been paid for by the Scarsdale school board...
...It was an embarrassing problem: 18 million Americans are functionally illiterate, unable to fill out simple forms or read without assistance...
...The problem has shown no signs of abating, with illiteracy levels remaining constant for the last 20 years...
...Up to this point, the Office of Education’s contract officer, Jacob Maimone, had paid little attention to the NRC...
...When Maimone discovered that Emery was making $50,000 a year, the Office of Education reduced his pay to $40,000, the maximum permitted by law...
...Allen was fired for publicly protesting the 1970 Cambodia invasion and was replaced by Sidney Marland...
...This nationwide system of tutors was envisioned as a tangible outgrowth of the President’s vague rhetoric about the virtues of “volunteerism...
...His appeals fell on deaf ears...
...The history of the, Right to Read program provides a revealing glimpse of how a program can pass through all the stages of bureaucratic life from creation to interment and leave only a few well-paid consultants the sadder for its departure...
...After the experiences of the Great Society, such debacles no longer cause outrage or even surprise...
...In July, 1971, Marland gave the Office of Education’s Ruth Holloway responsibility for monitoring the Right to Read program...
...Straley, a former member of the New York City school board, and more importantly, a personal friend of John Ehrlichman, also had some experience in the field...
...When it came to office supplies, though, the Office of Education balked...
...There is no justification nor comparison of the relative effectiveness of this and other programs...
...Perhaps its most notable achievement has been persuading milk companies to carry labels on their containers extolling the virtues of reading...
...The idea of Right to Read was developed in 1969 by the late James Allen, Richard Nixon’s first Commissioner of Education...
...Unlike the liberal social welfare specifically designed to avoid the pitfalls of the Great Society...
...Even today 90 per cent of the Center’s budget is administrative expenses...
...What Maimone did discover was that Emery’s $50,000 salary was $10,000 more than Office of Education regulations permit and $14,000 more than the Commissioner himself received...
...All this elaborate program has done is Wallace Roberts, American editor of Little Red Schoolhouse, is writing a book on the federal role in education, tentatively titled Ding Dong Politics...
...After this exposure of the “misspent funds,” both Emery and Straley resigned, but Emery didn’t stay away for long...
...No new appropriation bill has been passed for the Right to Read program in the past year and NRC has been limping along on an extension of its 1972 grant...
...An aura of slick competence came with the expensive decor-$1,000 desks and $75 wastebaskets...
...NO FURTHER EXTENSION IS GRANTED...
...the rest of its money went for overhead...
...Marland complained in a letter to Straley: There is no sequence of activities proposed...
...Allen, a Democrat, had acquired passable Republican credentials during the 12 years he served Nelson Rockefeller as New York’s Commissioner of Education...
...If NRC gets any new funds, Office of Education officials say privately, it will only be enough to close down the entire operation...
...In May of that year the auditors rendered their final judgment: the Center had misspent a total of $305,300...
...It also printed up thousands of brochures on reading and contracted for spot radio and TV announcements...
...What emerged was an expansive space without interior walls, broken only by pastel panels and color-coded furniture...
...Later that year Allen authorized Straley to organize the National Reading Center (NRC) as a private, non-profit corporation to find, train, and provide organizational support for the volunteer tutors...
...Allen came to the Office of Education with his eyes open, knowing the agency would be short on both White House support and money for new programs...
...There is virtually no evidence that the tutors actually have taught anyone to read...
...John Ehrlichman, and Fran Tarkenton have also served on the Council...
...Marland was informed of the developing patterns in the anti-illiteracy campaign and quickly took steps to gain control over Right- to Read...
...Right to Read: Lost in PR by Wallace Roberts In 1970 the Nixon Administration began a campaign to eliminate illiteracy in the United States...
...This was partly political judgment and partly an act of selfpreservation: Maimone is responsible for up to 1,500 grants at a time, and besides, he knew that Right to Read was a top-priority project with both White House backing and bipartisan support on Capitol Hill...
...The United States, France, and Belgium share the distinction of having the highest rate of functional illiteracy among the world’s developed countries...
...Its deliberate vagueness kept Maimone and his colleagues busy for almost another year trying to pin down just how much money had been spent for how many fancy wastebaskets...
...The program’s accomplishments are manifest...
...Either because of or in spite of the firm’s recommendations, Straley signed a five-year lease for the top two floors of a new office building at 1776 Massachusetts Avenue-almost twice as much space as called for in the Center’s original grant proposal...
...In May he was hired by the NRC as a planning consultant for three months at $3,333.33 a monthjust one penny less than the unpaid portion of his original $50,000 salary...
...The Center’s request for twocolor stationery was denied with the comment that “it would appear that it is more for decorative than functional purposes...
...She also challenged the Center on jurisdictional grounds, claiming that the NRC was duplicating the work of the Office of Education by not confining its activities to the private sector...
...On paper the program was ideal-a model of cut-rate social reform...
...With grants from the Ford Foundation, Straley hired a consulting firm, Educational Facilities Laboratory, to help in this vital quest...
...Within a few days, the NRC submitted a budget for the first half of the year...
...But Emery demanded the full $50,000...
...Finally, on April 23, he issued an ultimatum: THIS INFORMATION HAS BEEN REQUESTED SINCE OCT., 1970...
...train 2,000 volunteer tutors-if a weekend workshop really can be called training...
...The only ones who feel worse about that than Donald Emery are the 18 million functionally illiterate people still left in the U.S...
...One of his responsibilities at AT&T had been to initiate and supervise programs in basic skills training for telephone employees...
...The Office of Education ruled that $1 10,000 might have been allowed if the Center had properly sought approval...
...But by the spring of 1971, Maimone, curious about the money spent on office renovation, began pushing for the fiscal details he had only politely requested before...
...Right to Read was conceived as a program which would surmount these obstacles...
...Glen Campbell, Buzz Aldrin, Art Lmkletter, Senator Claiborne Pell, Mrs...
...But the auditors insisted that the Center return the remaining $107,000-a rather empty threat since the NRC’s only continuing ‘source of funding was the Office of Education grant...
...There is no indication that the Council has approved the tutor plan or the whole plan or that the members of the Council have agreed to do what the plan says they will do...
...For an administration that was anti-bureaucratic, the Right to Read program was designed to appeal to Richard Nixon by being loose and informal, avoiding huge government handouts by relying on an army of volunteer tutors...
...Not satisfied with his new quarters, Straley hired an architect to redecorate...
...But Right to Read was supposed to be different...
...One item included in the unexcused $107,000 was $5,800 in excess wages paid to Donald Emery...
...Of the 10 million tutors it set out to train, the Center managed to instruct some 2,000...
...In 1971, only $13,200 of its $1.2-million budget was expended for tutor training...
...Once Emery arrived in Washington, NRC picked up the tab...
...An organization outside the Office of Education would not only circumvent the educational bureaucracy, but could also reach the millions of illiterate adults who had dropped out or graduated without learning to read...
...Development of the Right to Read program was spurred by the bureaucratic prestige of being mentioned in President Nixon’s State of the Union address in January of 1970...
...On the public relations front, the National Reading Center hired pollster Lou Harris twice, at nearly $50,000 a shot, to discover there were 18 million Americans in need of its services...
...The next step in the fight against illiteracy was to secure office space...
...In its first two years of operations the Center spent about $4 million...
...The requisite press conference was called and the President made the solemn pledge that every American’s “right to read” would be realized by the end of the decade...
...No One G v ~Esm erv The controversy over the Center’s spending continued until the spring of 1972...
...Also excused was $88,000 in architectural and renovation expenditures...
...of plans...
Vol. 5 • September 1973 • No. 7
