President Obama was on this Hill this morning lobbying members of Congress on the stimulus bill. The House is voting on its version today and members expect to have legislation on the President’s desk by February 13. For the next couple days we are going to highlight some of the items that may be contained in the package. First up: education.

The House bill would include $150 billion of new federal spending for education — doubling the Dept. of Educations current budget. According to the New York Times:

The proposed emergency expenditures on nearly every realm of education, including school renovation, special education, Head Start and grants to needy college students, would amount to the largest increase in federal aid since Washington began to spend significantly on education after World War II.

Other proposals include:

• $79 billion to states to help them maintain services and avoid cuts to schools and pre-k programs
• $20 billion for school renovations
• $6 billion more for Pell Grants, increasing the budget for the aid program to $27 billion from $19 billion.

Critics of the bill are concerned about wasteful spending, but if the alternative is collapsing schools and a mass lay off of teachers, then we cannot let our education system crumble with the economy.

Earlier this month, I wrote about a decline in college graduation rates and the need for public policy ideas, such as scholarships with “incentive compontents,” to boost retention. The economic boosts from college stem from earning a degree, not just attending.

Today, the Wonk Room takes on this issue and links to this chart from The Quick and the Ed:

This flatlining should be a wake up call to policymakers, colleges and universities, and individual students.

Mort Kondracke, executive editor of Roll Call, believes that President Obama will make National Service a priority during his first 100 days in office:

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the day before his swearing-in, President Barack Obama’s inaugural committee stimulated a more than doubling of volunteer activity around the country.

It was a demonstration of a major development that’s likely to unfold in the Obama era — a quantum leap in both paid national service and volunteer citizen service.

What Obama’s predecessor, President George W. Bush, referred to as “the armies of compassion” may at last be mobilized in huge numbers to tackle the country’s social problems — and on a cost-effective basis, at that.

National Service has been a staple of PPI’s idea bank since its inception. In fact, we published and entire book on the subject in 2005. More recently, I co-authored a piece for First Focus, where we argued that community service should be tied with Baby Bonds, or birth accounts for every child:

These Baby Bonds would remain untouchable until the age of 18, when, thanks to compound interest, each child would have a modest pool of assets with which to start his or her adult life. In order to access the funds, however, each child must graduate from high school and perform a minimum of 100 hours of community service. These requirements would provide an incentive for every child to finish school, and instill in them a sense of responsibility and commitment to their communities.

Bill Clinton began the process by creating Americorp, which president Bush expanded. According to Kondrake, Obama may put a 21^st century spin on it:

Obama reportedly intends to establish a White House office to coordinate not only service programs, but “social innovation” and technology.

The government alone can’t solve all of our problems, but with help from each and every one of us, we can make it through these dark days. Let’s hope Kondrake is right about Obama’s plans.

After a week of celebration, President Obama hit the ground running today. One of his first tasks included signing executive orders and directives that will freeze the pay of the senior White House staff, tighten ethics rules and expand government transparency.  During his briefing, President Obama said:

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency,” Obama told senior staff members. The orders “will not by themselves make government as honest and transparent as it needs to be,” he said. “And they do not go as far as we need to go towards restoring accountability and fiscal restraint in Washington. But these historic measures do mark the beginning of a new era of openness in our country.”

The American people need a government they can trust, a government that will spend money wisely and responsibly, a government that is innovative and efficient.  Greater transparency is the only way we can achieve these things. As Obama said in his speech yesterday:

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works - whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. Those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account - to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day - because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

There is much work to do, but if this Administration upholds its pledge to be straight forward with the American people, better days are ahead.

Yesterday, House Democrats unveiled their plan for the $825 billion stimulus package that includes:

• $275 billion of tax breaks for individuals and businesses
• $119 billion of assistance to states for Medicaid, education and other critical services
• $117 billion for education
• $106 billion for assistance to low-income families in the form of an expansions to food stamps, unemployment, and short-term health insurance options for people who lose their jobs
• $90 billion for infrastructure spending
• $52 billion for green energy investments
• $16 billion of investments in science and technology
• $48 billion spending for other small scale projects

According to Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at Brookings, there is one important category missing from the list: investments in the non profit sector. She makes a strong case that through investments in non profits the government can:

take advantage of a huge network of institutions that work hard every day to improve the welfare of communities and individuals, that will spend the money quickly, that have the capacity to spread the dollars widely, and that in the absence of such help will need to shrink and thus become another drag on the economy.

The non profit sector is larger that I realized. In fact, as of 2006, it employed 10 percent of the U.S. work force and gave away or spent almost all of its $1 trillion in revenue. As the economy sours, non profit institutions will find it harder to serve their communities. Without added assistance, many organizations will not only have to cut back on services, but they will also have to cut back on personnel. Investing in the non profit sector can keep people employed and keep organizations that are already know the needs of their communities in business.

Today, PPI released a new book, Memos to the New President. It is a compilation of the memo series we have been doing for the past four months. Readers of this blog may be particularly interested in Chapter 3: Restoring the Promise of Social Mobility , which includes issues ranging from expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit to reducing the number of high school drop outs.

Earning a college degree is a big predictor of future economic success and mobility. The emphasis there should be placed on the degree, not attendance. Statistics show that it is the completion and actual degree - either from a two- or four-year institution - that boosts mobility.

Research from MDRC shows that half of all students who begin community college drop out before they are finished and do not go on to complete a degree within six years. However, scholars at MDRC have found a scholarship program that works to keep students enrolled and working toward a degree - making it a perfect topic for today’s “what works” post.

They evaluated a supplemental financial aid program in Louisiana that contained an “incentive component” to encourage students to stay in school:

With funding from the Louisiana Department of Social Services and the Louisiana Workforce Commission, the colleges offered students $1,000 for each of two semesters ($2,000 total) - distributed in three separate payments each semester - if they met two conditions: They had to enroll in college at least half time and they had to maintain an average grade of “C” or better. Students did not have to be welfare recipients, and the scholarships were paid in addition to federal Pell Grants. Program counselors monitored whether students met benchmarks, and physically handed the students their checks at the beginning, middle, and end of the semester.

They found very promising results from their random assignment study:

• More students registered for community college
• Students who participated in the program were more likely to be registered than those who weren’t part of the program;
• Students who participated earned more credit hours
• And the program made participants feel more engaged in their school environment

The Obama stimulus package pays special attention to job creation in female dominated industries…or as Christina Romer, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, says, “We don’t want this stimulus package to just create jobs for burly men.” These positions will come from investments in education, healthcare and retail trade. Politico reports that:

slightly fewer than half the newly created jobs will go to women, about 1,529,000 of the estimated total of 3,675,000 new jobs.

The number of households who rely on women for the primary source of income has greatly increased over the past four decades. In fact, “more than 4 million more than 4 million families looked to mom as the main breadwinner, double the number in 1990.”

Kudos to Romer and other members of Obama’s team for making sure federal investments will help women as well as men.

Part of Obama’s economic stimulus package includes an expansion of the child tax credit for low income Americans. The Wall Street Journal outlines the plan here:

Mr. Obama’s advisers on Monday outlined a potential new feature of the plan to congressional aides, saying they would press for a tax change that would allow more families that earn too little to pay income taxes to claim at least some of the $1,000-per-child tax credit. That would amount to an income subsidy, since it would refund taxes they are too poor to pay.

The plan would grant an estimated 5.5 million poor children access to the credit for the first time, and expand the tax benefit for millions more poor children who currently qualify for only a partial credit, according to its advocates. The change has been sought by Democrats and some moderate Republicans for years.

As of Jan. 1, a household must earn $12,500 a year to be eligible to claim any of the child credit. The proposal under discussion would lower that threshold, likely to $3,000, a level favored by top House Democrats, at a possible cost to taxpayers of $18 billion, said individuals familiar with the discussions. Currently, a part-time working mother earning $5,000 a year would get no child credit. With a $3,000 threshold, she would get $300.

This change to the child tax credit is long overdue. Furthermore, the expansion is targeted to low-income Americans who are likely to spend those extra dollars on necessary household items. Thus, we can expect this provision to have an immediate effect on the economy.

President-elect Obama amassed a historic list of supporters and contact information during the presidential election. As he transitions from campaigning to governing some have asked how he can keep all of these people actively engaged. How does he continue to utilize his massive database to continue grassroots involvement?

Yesterday, his team began this process with the launch of usaservices.org. This website will serves as a clearing house for service opportunities on the National Day of Service - Martin Luther King Jr. Day - and beyond:

President-elect Obama is calling on all Americans to do more than just offer a single day of service to their cities, towns and neighborhoods.  He is asking all of us to make an ongoing commitment to our communities. Never has it been more important to come together in shared purpose to tackle the common challenges we face.

This website is designed to help promote these events and for Americans to make their commitments, build communities, find opportunities to serve and share their results.

The site has the same look and feel of Obama’s campaign site. It features the same interactive features: a blog and tools that allow you to search for volunteer opportunities and even host them yourself.

One thing that the Left and the Right can agree on is that government alone can’t solve all of our problems. Each and every one of us must give back to our communities and fellow citizens. Will this effort be as successful as his get out the vote drive? We don’t yet know. However, President-elect Obama and his team should be applauded for using their impressive campaigning tools to call us all to something more.