IN THIS ISSUE

IG Report on Armstrong Williams Raises Questions 
A government report on payments to Armstrong Williams proves at least one White House official knew about the contract long before it became public knowledge. MORE...

Who's Reading Your CT Scan?
Some readers of a recent Washington Post story will view the offshoring of healthcare services as a choice between a "bleary-eyed staff radiologist" in an American hospital and a "well-rested" radiologist in India. But readers who went to the jump page learned that the choice is something else entirely. MORE...

Charter Schools Exploit a Texas-Size Loophole
They say everything is bigger in Texas, and that certainly holds true for a giant loophole in the state's school accountability system, particularly as it applies to charter schools. MORE...


IG Report on Armstrong Williams Contract Raises Further Questions

According to conventional wisdom, the best time to release bad news is late on a Friday afternoon--and that's a lesson the Bush administration has taken to heart. So it came as no surprise when the Department of Education (ED) chose a recent sleepy Friday afternoon to release an inspector general's report on the administration's hiring of conservative commentator Armstrong Williams to promote the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).

The timing of the release may have dampened news coverage in some media outlets, but it didn’t prevent two Los Angeles Times reporters, Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten, from digging into the IG's report. While many newspapers played up the finding that ED's actions didn't violate the law, the Times article stressed that at least one White House official knew about the contract long before it became public. The official, David Dunn, is a former special assistant to the president who now serves as ED's chief of staff. George Miller (D-Calif.) took issue with earlier White House statements about the contract, saying, "Although White House officials had professed ignorance of the Armstrong Williams contract, this report makes it clear they were aware but failed to intervene."

Hamburger and Wallsten saved a nice note of irony for the end of their article, noting that former Education Secretary Rod Paige "declined to respond directly to the report" and instead "referred questions to a Washington-based public relations consultant [emphasis added]."

Who's Reading Your CT Scan?

Some readers of a recent front-page story in the
Washington Post will view the offshoring of healthcare services as a choice between a "bleary-eyed staff radiologist" in an American hospital and a "well-rested" radiologist in India. But readers who went to the jump page learned that the choice is something else entirely.

The article begins with a description of Arjun Kalyanpur, owner of a teleradiology company in Bangalore, India, that interprets CT scans, MRIs and ultrasounds for patients in American hospitals. Some concerns arise early in the story--about accountability, licensing and privacy--but only after 25 paragraphs do readers learn that Kalyanpur is "embroiled in a malpractice case" in which a man died after Kalyanpur allegedly "failed to make it clear that more testing was urgently need to follow up on a CT scan he read."

It seems strange that the leading spokesman for the teleradiology industry is accused of mistakes that led to the death of a patient half a world away. But even if Kalyanpur is cleared of the malpractice charges, the issues of accountability, licensing and privacy remain.

Working conditions for healthcare workers need to be improved, as this AFT survey indicates.  And the AFT, which represents more than 65,000 nurses and other healthcare professionals, has taken the lead in supporting legislation to ban mandatory overtime in hospitals and to establish safe worker-patient ratios. Widespread adoption of these measures, as well as better support for institutions that train radiation technicians, would go a long way toward giving patients a better choice than a radiologist thousands of miles away.

Charter Schools Exploit a Texas-Size Loophole

They say everything is bigger in Texas, and that certainly holds true for a giant loophole in the state's school accountability system, particularly as it applies to charter schools.

Some 60 percent of Texas charter schools (compared to just 1.1 percent of Texas regular public schools) have declared themselves "alternative" schools, a label that allows them to avoid being held accountable for students' progress, according to the Dallas Morning News.

Gilberto Moreno, founder of one of the state's first charter schools, explained why his school sought the "alternative" label after landing on the state's list of low-performing schools in 2001: "We'd like to be [designated as] a regular campus, but the benchmarks just don't work for our population of kids." The student population at Moreno's school, however, is more economically advantaged than
in a typical Texas school, according to greatschools.net.

Moreno's further attempts to explain the school's alternative label were revealing. He said, "Being 'low performing' is the kiss of death. It's too risky."

Texas officials, as well as enlightened charter school advocates, might want to consider whether it's "too risky" to allow more than half of Texas's charter schools to operate outside the state accountability system. And federal officials might want to ask why the No Child Left Behind Act encourages low-performing schools to convert to charter status. In Texas at least, charter status represents the end of accountability.

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