There’s been a lot of news about stimulus reporting the last few weeks. A lot of it has focused on jobs created or saved; that’s understandable since that was a major point of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which is the stimulus’ grown-up name. The federal stimulus web site, Recovery.gov,  has posted the first compilation of stimulus grants, loans, and contracts, which covers the first six months under the act. The reports exclude funds allocated directly to individuals through such mechanisms as increased food stamp benefits, extended Unemployment Insurance, Medicaid payments, and tax cuts.

The STAR Coalition of organizations promoting accountability in the recovery praised this effort:

Our groups can now follow the money in ways they never could before and will use it to engage their policy-makers and build a recovery that benefit communities. We will also use the data to actively engage the public to better understand how the Recovery Act is impacting our communities, and how taxpayers can advocate to improve the Recovery Act and other government investments in the future. Read the rest of this entry »

In October, federal agencies, grantees, and contractors who are getting some of the stimulus (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act or ARRA) money are required to submit six month reports. This post points you to places you can see reports or summaries of them and includes some analysis and further thoughts. Read the rest of this entry »

As the debate about the speed and impact of stimulus spending rages on, Good Jobs First is taking on the less glamorous but equally important task of assessing accountability in state spending of funds from the stimulus bill (more formally, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or ARRA). They’ve launched the STAR (States for a Transparent and Accountable Recovery) Coalition, a national web site that assesses state efforts to inform citizens about ARRA spending.

Accountability is essential for any government program. Taxpayers cannot determine whether their resources are being used appropriately unless they can tell what is being spent, where it is spent, who is benefiting from the spending, and what is being accomplished. Congress and President Obama built unprecedented accountability tools into ARRA. If carried out faithfully, these tools will help us determine not just if the stimulus money is spent fast, but if it is spent right.

This week, STAR released a report that gave states two grades – one for a state’s main ARRA website and one for its reporting on transportation spending. Results are mixed.

Some state ARRA sites support the President’s promise that the $787 billion stimulus plan will be carried out with “an unprecedented level of transparency and accountability.” Other state sites are half-hearted efforts that provide residents little useful data on the largest federal stimulus since the New Deal.

Oklahoma comes out below average in STAR’s ratings. Oklahoma’s main site does a good job of centralizing program information and showing how funds are allocated in the state, but falls short in showing where money is being spent, which projects are being funded, and who is getting contracts. To this, we’d add that the site has an excellent compendium of news releases on the stimulus, but the site is  not always kept up to date.

The Oklahoma Department of Transportation (ODOT) site fares better in STAR’s rating, but still lags behind other states. It provides detail on individual projects and contracts, but offers no summary information on how much is being spent in a county, with a single contractor, or even how much is for new roads vs. resurfacing.

Also this week, OK Policy released its  second Stimulus Update, which evaluates over $700 million in ARRA infrastructure funding in Oklahoma. Nearly $400 million in Oklahoma Department of Transportation (ODOT)  projects, mainly resurfacing of state highways, are under contract and spending has topped $40 million. Federal, state, local, and tribal governments will be replacing buses, rehabilitating airport runways and dams and flood control structures, and expanding water and waste water systems. Infrastructure programs, which make up eight percent of all ARRA spending, can help Oklahoma’s economic recovery and pave the way for economic growth and lower costs in the future. With improvements in our accountability efforts, we’ll be able to tell when and where projects are being funded, who is building them, and what they are accomplishing.

Our stimulus page includes the previous Stimulus Update, as well as our earlier stimulus issue brief and fact sheet and links to valuable ARRA resources.

The Oklahoma State Board of Education recently adopted higher testing standards for elementary and middle school students. According to the Tulsa World, the higher standards result from recommendations of a committee of educators and business representatives. This effort responded to charges from business and conservative groups (and some left-leaning observers) that we set up test standards so most students would be considered proficient under the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).

New standards initially will result in  a drop in the proportion of students who meet basic and proficient standards in math and reading. If the theory behind high test standards is correct, students eventually will learn more and score higher on the more difficult tests. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Sandy Garrett argues:

There’s no doubt the bar has been significantly raised on what Oklahoma students are expected to know in math and reading in Grades 3-8. However, the Board and I believe this action was necessary to ensure Oklahoma students are competitive nationally and internationally and that our schools continue to move forward.

Higher standards are one education reform that people from across the political spectrum often support. It’s important to remember, though, that higher test standards and better outcomes are not necessarily the same thing. Dana Goldstein recently pointed out the difference in The American Prospect. Her column “Testing Testing” chronicles the growing movement for a national testing standard, cautioning that agreement on test standards can be oversold. Among Goldstein’s concerns is that the national testing movement is partly propelled by companies that make a living selling standardized tests. Another is that high standards can be created and attained through means other than testing.

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Spending from the $787 billion stimulus bill, formally known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or ARRA, is underway. Since passage of the bill in February, payroll withholding for most employees has been decreased thanks to the Making Work Pay tax credit, and food stamp and unemployment benefits for those in need have been increased. Most of the attention, however, has focused on funds being allocated through state government.  A recent Oklahoman editorial suggested that as Oklahoma begins to put federal stimulus dollars into projects to fix roads and bridges and other purposes, “it’s time for the public to begin the laborious task of holding government accountable for the billions in stimulus money en route to the states.” We wholeheartedly agree.

Last week I had the opportunity to attend a conference hosted by Good Jobs First that was specifically concerned with developing strategies for an accountable recovery. Good Jobs First is working closely with the advocacy organization OMB Watch and with national and state coalitions across the country to help ensure that citizens have access to comprehensive and timely information on stimulus funds. The national partners, known as the Coalition for an Accountable Recovery, and the state partners, known as the States for a Transparent and Accountable Recovery (STAR) coalition, have both launched websites that collect key documents and news releases related to the Recovery Act; the STAR website also has a blog.  Both coalitions have a particularly strong interest in watchdogging which companies are benefiting from contracts (and to the extent possible, sub-contracts) funded with stimulus dollars.

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As most observers of Oklahoma legislative politics know, in cases when only a handful of Democrats support controversial bills being promoted by the Republican majority, it’s usually the more conservative members of the caucus representing rural districts who buck party lines. But on SB 1111, a bill authored by Sen. Clark Jolley that moves various education reporting and accountability functions from the State Department of Education to the Office of Accountability based with the Regents for Higher Education, it was four mostly liberal Democrats (Anastasia Pittman, Rebecca Hamilton, Seneca Scott, and Jabar Shumate), representing some of the lowest-income urban districts in the state, who joined with 54 of 59 Republicans to pass the bill in the House and send it to Governor Brad Henry. Two of the Democrats supporting SB 1111 in the House (Pittman and Shumate), along with one of the two Democratic supporters of the measure in the Senate (Judy Eason-McIntyre), are among the five African-American Democrats in the Legislature (the other two African-American Democratic legislators, Rep. Mike Shelton and Sen. Connie Johnson, opposed the measure). Read the rest of this entry »