Sometimes change can come from the most unlikely of places, and sometimes even the highest levels of power can be shaken by a single person.

Cindy Cupp isn't an investigative journalist or even a corporate malfeasance attorney, but her modern sleuth-like story reads like it was ripped straight out of a 60 Minutes report.

Indeed, Cupp's story is about reading.

"I'm just a little old peon down here in Savannah," Cupp told The New York Times when describing herself and her company, which publishes reading kits for kindergarten and first-graders.

A small-business owner, Cupp sells reading kits to 80 of Georgia's 1,267 elementary schools. Her resume, however, may now include "whistle-blower" after exposing deeply rooted favoritism and conflict of interest in the Bush Administration's Reading First program.

Designed to ensure the literacy of low-income children, the $6 billion program allotted grants to states for reading textbooks and assessments. Far from its originally noble intent, Reading First morphed into a windfall for certain textbook publishers and authors — almost all of whom were the experts who set progam guidelines for which texts were "appropriate" for grant awards.

Giant publishers like Scott Foresman (who had several members dubiously linked to Reading First) and Macmillan/McGraw-Hill edged out Cupp Publishers in half a dozen Georgia schools over a three-year period.

Frustrated with being cornered out of a once-receptive market, Cupp began an investigation of her new situation through Georgia's open-record law. She found that an assigned national evaluator had never even looked at her program, yet it was deemed to be unfundable through Reading First.

"Cupp showed the investigators hundreds of documents she collected over three years that showed links between contractors hired by the federal government to evaluate school reading programs, and the writers of those programs. She also diagrammed these links. Her findings and those of others, including reporters for Education Week, found that consultants hired to help school districts apply for and run Reading First grants sometimes received hefty royalties from the very materials that schools were encouraged to buy," according to The New York Times.

In the end, Cupp's allegations provided a catalyst for an investigation that eventually resulted in three reports condemning "a lack of integrity and ethical values" in Reading First. The program's director resigned in September. Multiple other investigations are ongoing, including a possible criminal investigation.

Cupp's story offers us a simultaneously tragic and triumphant example. While other publishers would have given up and accepted defeat at the hands of the "bigger guy" with no knowledge of why or how, Cupp didn't take her attack lying down. In truth, she most likely saved many other small publishers from eventual bankruptcy in the process.

Perhaps more importantly, however, her story illustrates the vital need to aggressively seek information in today's world. Using open-record laws, which are available in all states to all citizens, Cupp individually read through hundreds of documents to discover and build her case.

According to the office of the Washington state attorney general, "Citizens can control their government only if they remain informed about the decisions their government officials are making."

Gathering information — no matter how nebulous — should not be something we shy away from in the face of controversy.

One wonders how many more cases of corruption we would find in our current government if more individuals like Cupp sought the information necessary to build their cases.

To learn more about public record laws in Washington state visit: http://atg.wa.gov/records/

Maureen Trantham: maureentrantham@thedaily.washington.edu