The Washington Post has a fantastic story on today’s front page accusing Sen. Mary Landrieu (D.-La.), in her role as chairwoman of the Senate’s D.C. appropriations subcommittee up until earlier this year, of forcing an unproven reading program on the District’s kindergarten and first grade classrooms in exchange for $80,000 in donations from the company that designed it.

It’s a long story, but it’s worth reading all the way through. On the surface, it tells the fairly damning tale of how the Voyager Expanded Learning literacy program, a product designed by a company with strong ties to the Bush administration, was earmarked for use in D.C. classrooms by the Senate, at Landrieu’s urging, after the company held a fundraiser for the Senator.

Most of the donors declined to discuss the donations or the fundraiser. Jeri Nowakowski, the Voyager executive vice president for product development who led the team that developed the company’s reading programs, and her husband donated $4,000. Nowakowski said Landrieu was one of the few Democrats to whom she had given campaign money because “I’ve just known that she has been a supporter of education.”

Campaign finance records indicate that Landrieu received contributions of about $30,000 on or about Nov. 2. Four days later, she went to the Senate floor and offered an amendment to the House bill with the $1 million Voyager earmark. Landrieu jettisoned the matching money requirement and doubled the federal portion to $2 million.

More broadly, the story demonstrates with shocking clarity the role the U.S. Congress has played in condemning D.C.’s public schools to failure by making them a testing ground for pet projects that have created an unworkable hodgepodge of curricula. No where else but in the District does the federal government get involved in determining which specific curricula will be used in public schools. Landrieu, as you might recall, was also one of three senators to place a hold on Mayor Fenty’s school takeover legislation earlier this year