An insightful eight-page report from the Foundation Center explores lessons learned from the first part of the Race to the Top competition. "Race to the Top: What Grantmakers Can Learn from the First Round"  was based on interviews with government leaders, foundation staff and education consultants that took place after the  winners of the first round were announced. The research revealed that states that scored best in the competition had a committed governor and a plan for reform that existed before the application process started. It also looked closely at the difficulty for the states in putting together the applications, stating “Interviewees who were directly involved in preparing applications . . . characterized the experience as being among the most challenging of their professional lives.”

 

One of the best summaries we’ve seen about stimulus-funded weatherization efforts ran in the Pew Center on the States’ online news site, Stateline,  on June 8^th. The story, “Weatherization Program Ramps Up After Slow Start,” focuses on the progress that’s been made in recent months, following the much publicized delays that the program faced in its first year. Based on U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) reports as well as other sources, writer Christine Vestal provides informative detail of the pre-stimulus history of the program and its potential to achieve energy savings. Among the states cited as being at the head of the pack are Delaware, Idaho, Ohio and South Carolina. Those lagging are Arizona, California, Florida, and Texas. According to the piece, the pace of weatherization is accelerating fairly dramatically with 25,000 homes weatherized in March 2010 and more than that expected for April. (That’s up from 12,000 in January.) While the tone is largely positive, Vestal also focuses on continuing headaches in quality control, accounting and reporting based on DOE work in Virginia and Delaware. 

 

Is too much stimulus money going to for-profit colleges? The Atlanta Journal-Constitution raised this question last Sunday in an article that examined the way stimulus funding of $17.1 billion in Pell grants for low-income students is being distributed. According to authors Jeremy Redmon and John Perry, profit-making schools increased their share of Pell grants from 16 percent of the total in 2007 to 21 percent in 2009, the first year of the stimulus. The article, called "For-profit colleges reap big benefit from stimulus", cites the number of lawsuits targeted at for-profit colleges as well as Government Accountability Office criticisms of high default rates. It also raises questions about the wisdom of providing funding for institutions like massage and beauty schools. On the other hand, the piece notes that supporters of for-profit schools say that they prepare people for good paying jobs and that criticisms tend to be elitist.

 

If you want a “flashcard” version of the “case for and against the stimulus” we recommend a very short online Atlantic piece. In addition to spelling out the reasoning behind stimulus spending and the danger of continued deficits, it looks both at liberal charges that too little was spent and conservative complaints that too few jobs were created. The piece, "Understanding the Case for and Against the Stimulus", by Derek Thompson, ends up with a brief lesson on why it’s so hard to determine the value of stimulus spending based on history. The best part? It does all this in less than two pages.