EDITORIAL – Williams, Dept. of Ed get schooled by scandal

We hope the Education Department will learn its lesson.

After conservative media figure… We hope the Education Department will learn its lesson.

After conservative media figure Armstrong Williams admitted to taking $240,000 from the department to promote support among minorities for the No Child Left Behind Act, Tribune Media Services dropped Williams’ weekly columns. CNN said it isn’t rushing to call him — a once-frequent guest commentator — either, according to an Associated Press report.

Williams has already paid for his mistakes and admitted that his actions warranted criticism.

But the Education Department is defending its giving Williams the money. The money obligated him to make one-minute plugs for the NCLB Act, and to have Education Secretary Rod Paige and others from the department as guests on his TV and radio shows. The Education Department stands by the legality of its actions, saying that paying Williams off was a “permissible use of taxpayer funds.”

Permissible or not, what’s legal isn’t always what’s ethical. Williams, as a journalist, shouldn’t be getting money from people he’s supposed to be interviewing. That’s what we like to call a conflict of interest — a major media no-no. Journalists shouldn’t dally with the people they report on, because throwing even one story destroys credibility.

And the Department of Education shouldn’t need to pay people to sell its policies, especially conservatives. Couldn’t it find one person who agreed with the NCLB without having to get out the ol’ checkbook? Surely there’s an education expert out there who likes NCLB. If only people weren’t so reluctant to go on television …

Plus, that $240,000 could have been used for better things — like paying 5.3 Pittsburgh elementary school teachers for a year or buying 4,000 Norton Anthologies of American Literature so kids could, well, read. Nothing wins people over to your side like actual results.

Whatever that money could have been spent on, it didn’t have to be spent getting someone to agree with a program under the guise of punditry. Compensating Williams shows no internal confidence in the president’s flagship education program. This is yet another blow to NCLB, which has already taken many hits for being under-funded, impossible to implement, and having a bad abbreviation.

So, while Williams got schooled, the Education Department needs to dig up its old ethics textbooks, give them a glance, then go to the blackboard and write what it did wrong — 240,000 times.