Anne Bubnic's List: ARRA/Best Practices

Concrete ideas from the Center for American Progress for strategic spending in three key areas-taking stock of current practices, focusing on support for quality instruction, and making transitional investments-in order to give some guidance to those districts seeking to balance the act's short-term focus on preserving jobs with its long-term goals of promoting student achievement.

This is a fabulous Stimulus Package Reporting idea - something that I've been thinking about too. It could work for every sector. Social media tools could play a huge role in organizing projects, monitoring progress and keeping everything transparent. I love all the concepts in this web site. Excellent work! Training would be needed however, because project leads are not necessarily the kind of people who normally use these tools.

The top education official in the Obama administration says that federal stimulus dollars for school districts are meant to be spent over two years, which aligns with the position of L.A. school officials in their ongoing political war with employee unions over looming layoffs. The comment by Education Secretary Arne Duncan is significant because unions have been campaigning for district officials to spend as much of the stimulus money as needed to save jobs now. District officials have countered that employees must agree to conditional salary concessions if all jobs are to be saved. District officials have argued that federal stimulus money should be split over two years, in large measure because both years are likely to prove economically dire.

The Center for American Progress has identified more than 300 initiatives in high-poverty, high-minority schools, among them many charter schools, that have significantly expanded learning time. The stimulus funds provide an opportunity to scale up these practices.

The Center for American Progress, along with our partners, has carefully crafted a policy definition of expanded learning time. Aimed at high-poverty, underperforming schools, expanded learning is the lengthening of the school day, school week, or school year for all students in a given school by at least 30 percent-the equivalent of roughly two hours per day or 360 hours per year. To be \neffective, the concept of expanded learning requires the complete redesign of a school's educational program in a way that combines academics with enrichment for a well-rounded student experience and that supports teachers by giving them more time for planning, training, and professional development. \n

The following five reforms can help states and school districts to implement innovative initiatives as they allocate their stimulus dollars across schools:

The Secondary School Innovation Fund Act would provide critical resources for innovative secondary school redesign to dramatically raise high school graduation rates and stem the flow of high school dropouts.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is offering federal cash incentives to achieve one of his top priorities: developing national standards for reading and math to replace a current hodgepodge of benchmarks in the states. Duncan said June 14 that the efforts of 46 states to develop common, internationally measured standards for student achievement would be bolstered by up to $350 million in federal funds to help them develop tests to assess those standards.