Politics K-12

From guest blogger Dakarai I. Aarons:

The Obama Administration has said the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would not only help drag the economy out of the doldrums, but also lead efforts to make the nation better equipped and more competitive in a global economy.

Or as U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan so often puts it, the economic-stimulus funding should be used to save jobs and drive reform.

But a report by the Government Accountability Office, released this week to Congress, shows those hopes for big improvement initiatives in the area of education haven't yet materialized. That's particularly true when it comes to the $48.6 billion State Fiscal Stabilization Fund, the biggest single pot of education-related stimulus funding.

Instead of focusing on the kinds of efforts Duncan has been traversing the country to promote, school district officials said they were planning to use the money primarily to avert layoffs, bolster professional development, and make up for any budget holes caused by cuts in state education funding.

School leaders in Flint, Mich., for example, said they simply didn't have enough money to start thinking about reform:

"In Flint, Michigan, officials reported that SFSF funds will be used to cope with budget deficits rather than to advance programs, such as early childhood education or repairing public school facilities. According to the Superintendent of Flint Community Schools, the infrastructure in Flint is deteriorating, and no new school buildings have been built in over 30 years. Flint officials said they would like to use SFSF funds for renovating buildings and other programs, but the SFSF funds are needed to maintain current education programs."

Even if schools wanted to use the state fiscal stabilization money for reform, the report found, many district leaders said they found directions on how to do so unclear.

“Officials in many school districts we visited reported having inadequate guidance from their state on using SFSF funding, making reform efforts more difficult to pursue. School district officials in most states we visited reported they lacked adequate guidance from their state to plan and report on the use of SFSF funding.”

The GAO is expected to release these stimulus updates every 60 days or so, and we'll keep you posted on what they find.

Posted by Michele McNeil at 4:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

The Education Department gets a "most improved" from Politics K-12 for finally putting the initial applications for state fiscal stabilization funding online—and living up to the transparency standards President Obama has set for spending stimulus money.

I've been making the case for this for weeks now (here and here), and other folks have joined in a call for more transparency as well. (UPDATE: To clarify, the Education Department has always posted online the final applications once they were approved, but at issue were the initial applications states submitted—before any changes were made.)

This is more than just a philosophical debate. It's important that the public be able to see what a state initially promises to do with its stimulus money, and what it ends up promising to do after any negotiations with the Education Department. What will be interesting to see, as well, is if the Education Department posts these initial applications as soon as they arrive, so the public has a chance to weigh in before the Education Department approves them. About 20 states have yet to submit their applications, and there's less than a month before the July 1 application deadline. (JUNE 11 UPDATE: ED has indeed started posting initial applications, before they're approved, online.)

Many more decisions on transparency will likely vex the Education Department. To name just one: Will officials make public and put online all of the applications for Race to the Top funding, once that process gets started, or just those that win the competitive grants?

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Several education advocacy organizations are riled up—as they probably should be—about a gap in the "transparency" of stimulus funds that I pointed out weeks ago. The U.S. Department of Education is refusing to make available the applications states submit for the state stabilization fund part of the stimulus package. The department only makes them public once they're approved. This does not permit the public to see beforehand what a state promised to do with its stimulus money, so that it can be compared with what a state ended up agreeing to do after any negotiations with the feds. What's more, you can't even see the original application after everything's been finalized.

The New Jersey-based Education Law Center, the New York-based Campaign for Fiscal Equity and the Alliance for Quality Education, and the Georgia School Funding Association sent a letter to the department urging much better transparency regarding the stabilization fund. By not making the submitted applications public while they are still being considered, taxpayers, parents, and other members of the public can't review them or comment on them, the letter points out.

"The lack of basic procedures to ensure accountability, openness and public participation by both states and USDOE is deeply concerning," David G. Sciarra, the executive director of the Education Law Center, told me in an email.

In fact, the New Jersey folks sent another letter today asking U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan & Co. to reject the state's application because it doesn't fully meet state school funding formula increases, especially in light of a new decision last week in the long-running Abbott case. Of course, I can't point you to New Jersey's stabilization fund application because the education department isn't making it public. This is the first time, that I'm aware of, that someone has petitioned the department to reject an application.

At least when it comes to these applications, one could question whether the education department is living up to those "unprecedented" levels of transparency that President Obama has touted.

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In a story for our latest issue of Education Week, I raised some red flags about transparency in spending stimulus money. I pointed out that the U.S. Department of Education had not posted online communications between lobbyists and agency officials as required by a March 20 directive from President Obama.

Now it has.

You'll see two files (only one link seems to be working right now) detailing these communications. (UPDATE: A tech-savvy reader of the blog discovered the correct link for the one that doesn't work, so click here.) Props to Education Department officials for the level of detail in the April 23 document, which details a call or meeting of some sort between five Education Department officials and four lobbyists (representing ACT, the Alliance for Excellent Education, the Knowledge Alliance, and the National Staff Development Council.) It's unclear whether there were non-lobbyists involved in this discussion, but regardless, they all discussed the state stabilization fund and the data metrics that the Education Department wants in exchange for the remaining one-third of the stabilization-fund money.

And, I'm not sure if we've heard this before, but the Education Department plans to require states to provide the data—or their plans to make the data available within the next two years—by September 30, 2009.

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The U.S. Department of Education has revealed in their weekly reports updated today that four states—as of April 10—have submitted their applications for the state fiscal stabilization fund. These applications are important because they show a state's commitments to use the money as intended (to prop up local education budgets) and to make progress on key education reforms.

They are: California, Illinois, Maine, and South Dakota.

In this blog's continuing efforts to monitor the "unprecedented levels of transparency" surrounding the stimulus package, I've tried to get copies of these applications.

Of the four states, only one has put their application online (that I've been able to find.) South Dakota. So kudos to the state and Republican Gov. Mike Rounds (since governors are the ones officially submitting these applications.) If you know of any other applications available online, please leave a comment or email me. UPDATE: An eagle-eye reader pointed me to California's application, which you can find on the state's department of education Web site here. So make that two states.

It should be noted that Illinois' lack of transparency, so far, comes even though the state put out a press release, in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Education, touting education secretary Arne Duncan's visit yesterday to the state and their planned use of stabilization fund dollars. After two calls to the governor's office over the past two days, a call to the state's commerce department (which is handling the stimulus package apparently) and an email to the commerce department's press officer, I still haven't gotten anybody to email me their application.

The federal education department, for their part, says that although they've committed to making approved applications public, they were undecided (as of yesterday) as to whether submitted applications would be public. It seems as though it would be important to see what a state originally promised to do in relation to stabilization fund money, and what ended up being in their "approved" application. Though in many instances the two could be the same thing, that may not always be the case.

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There are grand promises from the Obama administration that the $787 billion in stimulus funding will be spent with "unprecedented levels of transparency." And in a recent edweek.org interview with Education Secretary Arne Duncan, I asked him whether a parent would be able to follow the money all the way from the federal government down to the school level. He said:

There's never been such transparency. Recovery.gov is the Web site.We'll be tracking state-by-state and district-by-district how money is being spent.

Well, now that some $44 billion is starting to flow out of the ed department's doors, it's time to start putting this "unprecedented" transparency to the test.

During Duncan's visit to the Bruce Randolph School in Denver yesterday, the principal announced the school had already received about $200,000 in stimulus money, and must decide how to spend it by Friday.

So I decided to follow the money—backward. Since everything seems to hinge on these recovery Web sites, I started at Colorado's official recovery Web site. Besides a general chart listing education as one category for stimulus funds, I could find no mention of any education funding coming into the state under the Web site's categories of "news", "accountability board", "jobs and projects", "helping people", "resources", and "contact." For good measure, I made sure the Colorado Department of Education didn't have any specific information (they didn't).

Hitting a roadblock, I turned to the U.S. Department of Education's recovery web portal to see if I could find traces of money flowing to Colorado. Buried under "agency reports" are weekly reports in Excel spreadsheet format that detail money flowing out the door. (Are Excel spreadsheets really the best way to be transparent to the general public, many of whom may not have experience with this format?) The latest information from April 7 indicates that the department has spent $11 billion so far—but the information is in broad categories such as special education, Title I, or student financial assistance, with no state-by-state information.

The federal government's main stimulus Web portal, recovery.gov, has an "accountability and transparency" section containing links to the members of the new federal accountability board, and to reports by inspectors general. Nothing on the flow of money. A separate section on "agency progress and resources" contains the same weekly reports on agency websites, and links back to the agency's recovery Web sites. Still, no trace of money flowing to Colorado.

So far, all levels of government are failing the transparency test because, besides a mention in a news story, there's no evidence that money has made its way to Colorado school districts. So far, this unprecedented transparency involves some nice-looking Web sites with spreadsheets showing large chunks of money going out the door. That's not exactly living up to Duncan and Obama's promises. To be sure, it's early. Money has only recently started flowing. But an early test of the transparency claim shows there's a long way to go.

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