Weekly Round Up

Catch Up on the Week at CAP: February 9 - 13, 2009

ECONOMIC RECOVERY

Debating the Recovery and Reinvestment Plan

CAP focused during the first half of the week on providing analysis on the House and Senate American Recovery and Reinvestment Acts. Will Straw supplied state-by-state job creation comparisons for the bills, Michael Ettlinger discussed why the negotiations should favor the House bill, Scott Lilly explained why the Alternative Minimum Tax provisions should not be included, and other CAP experts dug into specific provisions such as health IT, energy, health care, women's jobs, arts funding, and education.

ECONOMIC RECOVERY

Next Steps for Economic Recovery

The House and Senate came to a compromise on Wednesday. So what happens next? CAP produced a short animated video that shows how the economic recovery will actually work: how it goes about creating jobs and spreading economic growth. And Michael Ettlinger answered questions about how soon we should expect to see the bill's effects and how we can avoid a similar economic downturn in the future.

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Darwin Day

Thursday marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. To celebrate the event, CAP and Science Progress held an event Wednesday on “Evolution, Transcendence, and the Nature of Faith,” and Science Progress released a series of features on the man and his works. D. Graham Burnett and Chris Mooney wrote a piece on the cultural history of evolution, Chris Mooney interviewed Darwin's great-great grandson, screenwriter Matthew Chapman, and Rick Weiss discussed Darwin's methods in The Washington Post.

EDUCATION

The Other College

CAP continued its research series on higher education this week with a report on two-year colleges. Two-year colleges have long been the stepchildren of the higher education family of institutions, the so-called “other college,” yet 40 percent of college attendees are enrolled in these institutions. Report authors Molly F. McIntosh and Cecilia Elena Rouse recommend that national leaders would be wise to move the “other college” to the forefront of the postsecondary policymaking arena and offer insight into boosting retention and completion rates at these schools.