Education Week got its hands on a stack of emails from the Reading First czars at the U.S. Department of Education and stumbled across some interesting stuff. How you view the heavy-handedness used by the feds to promote the reading programs for which they were paying may depend on your views on the best ways to teach reading, but there is some interesting stuff in there about the use of power, proper or otherwise.

The White House's apparent interest in battling NYC's "balanced literacy" selection, as revealed in one of the emails, is utterly fascinating -- proving again that that the Bush administration cared much more about enforcing Reading First than, say, the public school transfer option under No Child Left Behind. (You'll recall that the Bloomberg administration came out of the box very quickly against transfers out of failing schools in 2002 after winning mayoral control. The only response from the administration at the time came from the crickets chirping on the White House lawn...)