Education Week's Michele McNeil provides a terrific explainer on how several states still have a lot of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act dollars to spend, even though the deadline to "obligate" them was Sept. 30.

Several states have a combined total of $2.28 billion left to use, McNeil writes. Among those states: New York, Texas, Indiana, and Arkansas.

The states are not only supposed to enter contracts by Sept. 30, but they also are expected to actually disperse the cash by Jan. 3, 2012. They can ask for an extension until March.

Then again, U.S. Department of Education officials recently encouraged states to save their cash from the Title I stimulus segment of those dollars. That amounts to $710 million.

You might want to check on your own state's status and ask whether they have contracted to spend the dollars and where they are using them.

How much improvement can you make at a failing school when you only have a month or two to plan and implement your reform?

Not too much, at least in six states, the Government Accountability Office concluded in a report released July 25 about the federal School Improvement Grants program,which awards $2 million a year to the lowest-achieving, highest-poverty schools.The SIG program has grown from $125 million in 2007 to $3.5 billion in 2009.

It’s difficult to implement rigorous reform strategies if you don’t have the time to attract reform-minded principals and talented teachers, the report noted. For instance, some state applications -- due in February 2010 -- were not approved by the U.S. Department of Education until summer 2010.

The GAO recommended the Education Department move up the application deadlines to ensure more timely implementation. In fact, the education department had, although not early enough ...

What happens to special education when federal stimulus dollars run out?

IDEA Money Watch, a watchdog group that monitors special ed expenditures, including Recovery Act funds, fears that school districts could begin to cut back their spending in the coming year. And it has reason to.

In 2009, schools districts were allowed to supplant up to half of their local spending required by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (the federal special ed law) with stimulus dollars. Now that the stimulus dollars are running out, they don't necessarily have to return their local allocations to the previous level -- so a lot of services geared for students with disabilities could suffer in the coming year.

IDEA Money Watch obtained the district-level data for fiscal years 2008 and 2009, which show how much school districts received in federal funding before the stimulus and in the ARRA year-- and how much they ...

The Government Accountability Office has published a progress report on Race to the Top, the U.S. Department of Education's highest-profile competitive grant program funded by the economic stimulus law. (Hat tip to Ed Money Watch over at the New America Foundation, which has an informative post summarizing the report.) The report examines, among other topics: (1) what states did to compete for the grants; (2) how winning states plan to use their share of the money; (3) challenges in implementing state reform efforts; and (4) the DOE's support and oversight of states’ use of Race to the Top funds.

As you'll recall, the Race to the Top winners were Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Tennessee. According to the report, they plan to use the largest share of their winnings to improve educator effectiveness ...

New federal data compiled on EdMoney.org, EWA's stimulus-tracker website, show that cumulatively, the 50 states and the District of Columbia have spent 74.82 percent of their funding for education from the 2009 economic stimulus law.

As of the end of April 2011, 28 states had reported spending 75 percent or more of their stimulus money, while 40 states reported spending two-thirds of it or more. The 10 states that had reported spending the largest share of their funding were:

Iowa, 93.07%
New Hampshire, 92.42%
South Dakota, 89.14%
Minnesota, 87.36%
California, 87.12%
Idaho, 86.92%
New Jersey, 86.84%
Arizona, 85.61%
Illinois, 85.25%
Indiana, 84.62%

The 10 states that reported having the most stimulus aid still to spend were:

Wyoming, 34.28%
Alaska, 34.33%
Delaware, 41.77%
Tennessee, 44.07%
Rhode Island, 51.58%
Hawaii, 54.73%
District of ...

With contributions from Noah Bierman, Boston Globe; Liz Bowie, Baltimore Sun; Grace Merritt, Hartford (Conn.) Courant; Tara Malone, Chicago Tribune; Betsy Hammond, The (Portland) Oregonian; Andrea Eger, Tulsa World; Karel Holloway, The Dallas Morning News; Jeannette Rundquist, Newark (NJ) Star-Ledger; and John Mooney, NJSpotlight.com

In the two years since Congress made the federal government’s largest one-time investment in public schools, change has rippled through classrooms from coast to coast. Tennessee and Delaware have revamped their laws to promote the growth of charter schools. Massachusetts and Maryland have launched efforts to tie teacher evaluations to student performance. Reflecting similar moves elsewhere, a persistently failing high school in Oregon is investing a record amount in additional training for teachers.

Nationwide, the economic-stimulus package has prevented massive teacher layoffs, spurred states to devise sweeping reform plans and jumpstarted a national conversation about overhauling the worst schools.

But over the long term ...

For the long-troubled public school system of New Orleans, the 2005 hurricane that broke the levees and displaced thousands of students also cleared the way for a nonprofit with the self-explanatory name New Schools for New Orleans. Now, that start-up organization has become both a symbol of an educational renaissance in post-Katrina New Orleans and an example of the groundbreaking change being encouraged by the federal government.
 
The $650 million Investing in Innovation program, better known by the shorthand “i3,” is a part of the nearly $100 billion stimulus effort designed to preserve education jobs and spark dramatic classroom reforms. The i3 program underscores the Obama administration’s determination to pursue those reforms by both fixing existing educational systems and encouraging experimentation with new ideas.
“We want ideas that work to actually grow faster because they were a part of this program,” said Jim Shelton, who runs the i3 program ...

With contributions from Liz Bowie, Baltimore Sun, and Edith Starzyk, The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer

The flood of federal stimulus money into the nation’s public schools has dramatically increased the demand for education consultants, leaving some stimulus recipients struggling to find seasoned advisors and others uneasy about the pitches they are getting.

The frenzy was caused by the unprecedented size and scope of the nearly $100 billion federal effort, which began two years ago. That has stirred up great expectations among policymakers and the public. Faced with nerve-wracking timelines, their own bold promises and a dearth of in-house expertise, states and school districts have anxiously sought advice on how to demonstrate progress and avoid missteps. “Some are calling it ‘No Consultant Left Behind,’ ” says Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C.

There are consultants who ...

With contributions from Grace Merritt, Hartford (Conn.) Courant; Dan Hardy, Philadelphia Inquirer; Eleanor Chute, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Sarah Day, Juneau (Alaska) Empire.

The economic-stimulus package that Congress passed two years ago preserved hundreds of thousands of jobs in the nation’s public schools but, with the economy still sputtering, the future of many of those positions remains in jeopardy.

In all, the nearly $100 billion shot-in-the-arm funded 367,524 education-related jobs during the 2009-10 school year, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Though this tally includes jobs saved and created, observers say states and school districts did not go on a hiring spree with their stimulus funds. Instead, they hunkered down to prevent mass layoffs and to maintain the status quo—no small feat, given the historic recession and the soaring budget deficits that resulted.

“We saved 350,000 jobs. How often do you get to do that in ...

Want to look into exactly what your state promised to do for Race to the Top but not sure where to start? Getting lost in all the jargon?

Reporter Andy Brownstein wrote up the following explainer as part of a project that The Hechinger Report and EWA are working on. (More on that later!)

He gives a good rundown on how to get to the meat of these applications:

Race to the Top applications offer countless story leads.  They contain detailed narratives explaining their plans and offer up intricate timetables for achieving their goals.  However, due to the fact that these are written at the state rather than the school level, these applications can prove rather formidable.  With that in mind, here’s a handy “cheat sheet” for getting started:

•    Begin by reading the peer reviewers’ comments. Each application was scored by a panel of five outside experts.  While they ...

It seems just about every newspaper these days is working on a story about the budget woes facing districts now that much of the stimulus money has dried up.

With the drama of teachers being laid off and programs being shut down, sometimes the big picture of school finances can get left out of those daily stories. The Hartford Advocate has an interesting piece that might be worth replicating.

The piece is a nice explainer of how education is funded and really helps readers understand more than just "X teachers to be laid off." The idea is to really put the cuts into context.

While many papers might not have room for such a comprehensive explainer, this kind of thing could be boiled down to a short sidebar or even an infobox.

It is no surprise that many states and districts are using stimulus money to save jobs from the chopping block, but a government official in one New York county is raising an interesting objection.

New York state used $5.5 million in stimulus money this past school year to fund a children's program in Dutchess County, according to the Poughkeepsie Journal.

The paper reports that County Executive William Steinhaus is refusing to file paperwork saying the money preserved 60+ jobs. He argues that the positions were never in danger, because the program is mandated by the state itself and has been in place for many years.

The state argues that federal rules allow them to count the positions.

This could be an interesting story at the local level, particularly with conservative communities where the stimulus isn't too popular.

Another interesting angle would be to track down the reports ...

The last two EWA Education Research and Statistics Boot Camps have focused on looking at how states and school districts are spending federal education stimulus dollars. Reporters analyzing the numbers for the February conference came up with some terrific pieces.

But the first story out of the December conference at Northwestern is quite an eye-catcher. Rena Havner of the (Mobile) Press-Register crunched the numbers during the seminar and discovered that the largest recipient of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act dollars wasn't a school district or even the state Department of Education. It was the Department of Corrections. The state exploited a loophole in the federal funding to divert education dollars to prisons. In fact, the state spent four times as many stimulus dollars on prisoners as it did on K-12 students.

Congratulations to Rena for a terrific scoop.

When Race to the Top phase II winners were announced in August, the clock started ticking. States had 90 days to submit “scope of work plans” from districts who wanted their share of the funds. By the Nov. 22 deadline, the Department of Education required goals, timelines and budgets to accomplish all the proposals outlined in the initial applications applications.

As EdWeek reported last week, all ten winners met the deadline, but in some states, individual districts opted to give up their share of the money and not turn in a plan. The submitted plans aren’t posted online yet, but a Department of Education spokesperson said they will be made public at some point.

If you have a district in your area that is participating, you should be able to get a copy of their scope of work. At least one district, Pinellas County in Florida, has given its ...

A new study by Bellwether Education Partners gives a nice overview and some insight into how schools have been spending their share of the stimulus funding. The report was commissioned by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which spent around $3 million to help districts figure out how to use their stimulus funds wisely.

So how did the districts spend the money?

According to the report, most simply used it to offset shrinking state and local funding and didn’t do much reform. The report argues that federal officials sent mixed messages and didn’t do much to dissuade states and districts from simply using the stimulus money to prevent layoffs.

The report does highlight a few districts where the money was used as an opportunity to push reforms, though.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg used the combination of budget cuts and ARRA to advance a fundamental overhaul of its approach to human resource ...