A NIH For Education

Congressional leaders plan to funnel federal funds into educational innovation geared to the cutting edge of the digital era. If successful, their legislative effort -- still being honed and yet to be announced -- would blaze fresh trails across the nation's education system, spawning a broad range of new technologies, chiefly via cyberspace, to be used in classrooms and offices.

The lawmakers' initiative could do for the overall learning experience of both schoolchildren and adult workers what the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the initial incubator of the Internet, does for the military sphere. The nascent educational scheme would be comparable to what the National Science Foundation does for science and what the National Institutes of Health does for medicine.

The main impetus for the plan comes from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who plans to incorporate it into her overall innovation agenda. She's enlisted the support of Reps. John Dingell, D-Mich., chairman of House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Ed Markey, D-Mass., who heads the panel's subcommittee on telecommunications and the Internet. Rep. Ralph Regula of Ohio has agreed to serve as the lead Republican sponsor in the House.

The Democrats' legislative strategy calls for the House to take the lead, with the Senate to follow suit, possibly attracting some more Republican support along the way. In the Senate, Chris Dodd, D-Conn., chairman of the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, and Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., the majority whip, have agreed to serve as the key sponsors.

The education innovation timetable calls for a two-phased approach. In the initial phase, Congress would create a National Institute of Learning, Science and Technology within the Department of Commerce. The institute would initiate a pilot program of grants for applied research that would dispense $500 million over five years.

Once this demonstration phase had proven its worth, the program would get a fresh infusion of federal money, on the order of $1 billion a year over eight years. Those funds would come from the proceeds of the government's plan to auction off large parts of the wireless spectrum as the country adopts an all-digital television system. Congress has mandated March 1, 2009, as the cutoff date for the current analog system to go dark. Viewers hooked into cable or satellite services, currently about 85 percent of U.S. households, would not be affected.

Estimates of the value of the spectrum auction range between $10 billion and $28 billion. It could generate billions more in taxes by creating enhanced services and competition among existing telecommunications providers.

In phase two, the Pelosi plan would allocate about 20 percent of this new revenue stream to the digital educational initiative. In that respect, it tracks closely with a long-standing effort to transform learning in the United States through a Digital Opportunity Investment Trust Act. Lawrence K. Grossman, the former president of NBC News and Public Broadcasting Service, and Newton N. Minow, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and now a Chicago-based attorney, first proposed the act in a 2001 report called "A Digital Gift to the Nation." Their initiative soon drew support from a wide swath of players, including Google, Hewlett-Packard and the American Federation of Teachers. And Congress soon allocated money to study the concept's feasibility.

Before the Democrats took control of Congress, the DOIT approach failed to gain traction. It also faced another problem: Under current law, Congress has given the FCC until September 2011 to conduct its big spectrum auction.

Pelosi's proposed legislation still faces several potentially daunting hurdles. Congress would have to enact the pilot program and assess its effectiveness.

However, if all goes well in the proponents' view, a steady stream of funds would be invested in research and development for digital support of education for everyone from toddlers to seniors. The money would go to create sophisticated simulation programs such as those now being developed for the military. It would digitize library, museum and university collections. It would apply recent advances in cognitive science to educational software. Among other projects, the federal institute could develop vocational materials for workforce retraining, lifelong-learning support and emergency and safety training for the general public to use after disasters.

By now, virtually all U.S. high schools have been equipped with computers and are plugged into the Internet. But, sources noted, they lack the sophisticated software that would enable these machines to enhance student education. Accordingly, as envisioned, the institute would underwrite research and development, teacher training, educational software, after-school computer literacy projects and technology instruction for workers. It would also award grants to libraries and museums to bring more of their collections online.