Commentary

The Government Fails the Transparency Test in Education Stimulus Spending

Michelle McNeil, at Education Week’s Politics K-12 blog, reports on her painstaking efforts to track down the transparency of stimulus money flowing into Colorado schools, after visiting the Bruce Randolph School in Denver and learning that the school has already received $200,000 in education stimulus money and the principal was debating how best to spend it. Michelle tries to track the tranparency of the money through several “transparecy” reporting sites including Recovery.gov, Colorado’s Recovery website, and the U.S. Department of Education’s Recovery web portal. She searches government websites, Excel spreadsheets and government documents to no avail:

So far, all levels of government are failing the transparency test because, besides a mention in a news story, there’s no evidence that money has made its way to Colorado school districts.