Raegen Miller on Education and the Stimulus

What kind of education provisions are included in the recovery and reinvestment package?

The education money in the recovery package is spread throughout in a bunch of different areas, but in the money that's destined to go out from the Department of Education, you can divide it into three categories under the convenient heading of C, S, and I. There is categorical funding, and this comprises $26 billion for both Title I and IDEA, or individuals with disabilities in education grants to states. And there's stabilization money, and that's $79 billion to states in some complicated ways, and a lot of it for education, $7.5 billion of which actually is also really carefully tied to keeping states pushing in the right direction on some crucial education reforms. And lastly there's a lot of infrastructure money. There's $20 billion for modernization and building of schools, and also higher education facilities.

Why is education important to economic stimulus?

Well, education really represents a major way of investing in the future of the country. The students need excellent teachers and facilities in order to learn skills they need to succeed in the workforce and for us to have a competitive economy. So putting money in education has real long-term sense to it. There's also a lot of money that's meant to have sort of immediate effects, too, in terms of forestalling layoffs and really preventing the symptoms of recession from exacerbating the economic woes that we're currently experiencing. So the money all together has real long-term sense to it, but meshes with the idea of an economic stimulus, which needs to have some kind of immediate impact.