Why the Obama Administration Wants a Darpa for Education

March 4, 2011, 11:59 am

The Big Brains at Darpa have dreamed up some pretty cool stuff over the years: GPS, mind-controlled robotic arms, the Internet.

So could education benefit from its own version of the Pentagon-led research agency?

The Obama administration thinks the answer is yes. Its proposed 2012 budget includes $90-million to kick off the effort, conceived as a way to support development of cutting-edge educational technologies.

Why the need for a new agency? Education research and development is “underinvested,” argues James H. Shelton III, assistant deputy secretary for innovation and improvement in the U.S. Education Department. A new agency—its name would be “Advanced Research Projects Agency-Education”—would have more flexibility to identify specific problems and direct efforts to solve them, he says. Plus, it would be able to attract top outside talent to work on these projects.

Mr. Shelton offered few specifics on what projects the new agency would support, but he did suggest that education officials want to build on work that’s already been done by other agencies. He pointed to Darpa’s work on digital tutors as one example.

One of the big problems that has not yet been solved, Mr. Shelton says, is this: “How do you actually enable teachers to personalize instruction for students and access the resources that best match the needs and interests of those students?”

A more immediate problem might be finding the cash to pay for this agency. As Science wrote, the idea is “certain to inflame Congressional Republicans trying to pare down the size of the federal government, especially its education programs.” And Education Week pointed out that another Darpa spinoff housed in the U.S. Department of Energy went unfunded until 2009, even though it was authorized in 2007.

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la_profesora

“How do you actually enable teachers to personalize instruction for students and access the resources that best match the needs and interests of those students?”

Well, for starters, you get rid of “standards-based” education in K-12. I can’t think of anything more antithetical to personalised instruction.
12066808

Better start with a Czar!!!
11250382

Or two!!
11250382

Finding money for the project? Easy – just print some. That really seems to have been working well for the past two years.
rogue_academic

I can’t fend off a nagging thought that the golden years of the US dominance in science and education happened before DoED was established in 1979. Before we managed somehow even without all that education research, but ever since we are in decline. Coincidence?
richardtaborgreene

Corporations are now here——
1) global horizontal processes–highly software automated and mediated
2) such processes PUNCTUATED by regular mass design events–intense inexpensive face-to-faceness
3) tuning 1 and 2—feeling how much face to face-ness is needed to make the e-enable processes to work well—add more events of a certain type or add events of a new type or subtract events till the WEAVE of e-mediated process with face-to-face event works well.
No particular reason exists that I am aware of (does not mean much) why education or learning work should be different.

Corporations do not much bother with “personalizing instruction”. They way they see it—reality will mash you and I like bugs if we get in its way. A certain fearful respect for reality causes us to learn it and attend to it. Reality never needs special “motivation”. The motive is to continue to exist. Students learn about the world because the world crushes all who do not learn about it. Avoiding mash-ment is perhaps suboptimal as a motive, but corporations find it adequate and cheap.

Education is at a tipping point. Anyone and anything in colleges, schools, that merely informs, is being humiliated daily more and more by the web. Eventually people will just laugh. So all who educated are being forced to…..stop informing and start……(this is embarrassing)……educating. Read Hannah Arendt for the details.
ArthurGuinness

The Obama administration would do well to keep hands off our education system. Can we afford any more meddling?
Guest

Why doesnt the government just create an incubator or work with VC’s to do this? Sounds like a front for something more nefarious! Maybe I should ask them to be a partner in my startup… (not something nefarious btw)
quacker

So now we will have DoE version 2 without getting rid of DoE version 1. Does the Obama administration have any idea what the phrase “smaller government” even means? “Underinvested” – REALLY.
trace_urdan

Like many of his brethren in the Obama administration, Mr. Shelton’s resume is quite impressive. He has a B.S. from Morehouse and an MBA from Stanford. He has worked at McKinsey and for Mike Milken’s private equity organization Knowledge Universe, buying and selling education companies. Most recently he was a program director at the Gates Foundation.

I have heard Mr. Shelton speak. He is persuasive and sincere in his contention that if the obstacles (funding, bureaucratic, and political) fettering him and his similarly-credentialed colleagues were simply removed, they could solve all of America’s problems.

But the market for educational technology is robust and active. Private and public equity firms continue to readily fund technologies that promise to make a difference in improving the quality of educational achievement in a demonstrable way. Obviously they have not adequately solved the problem of American education, but that is surely not a function of the quality of innovation or lack of funding.

So the proposal simply represents the government suggesting that its methods, scientists, engineers, etc. would be superior to those sponsored by the private markets. And the $90 million to fund a government competitor to the private sector? Well, the private capital markets will likely see that has 90 million reasons to pass on trying to compete with Mr. Shelton and his colleagues.

Trace Urdan
Signal Hill
studentsuccess10

Federal funding for research in universities will corrupt and destroy the academic freedom in these institutions to a further extent than the ‘student aid’ factor already has. I’d avoid this unless there are very strict criteria that would not allow the Federal bureaucrats to further interfere with the administration and management of institutions just because the Feds awarded a little cash.
http://mywikibiz.com/Directory:Jon_Awbrey Jon Awbrey

There is a not unrelated discussion at The Wikipedia Review:

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=33212

Please feel free to join in.
uwstaff

“Most of ours are from around here anyway.”

That speaks volumes. Not a criticism, exactly, but I think it says something about how non-teaching staff are valued.
david_evans

Well, but for a few exceptions in admissions and student affairs, where the expectation is that entry-level folks will only do a few years and then move on to another institution (and thence where location is not so crucial), it’s extremely difficult to get entry-level professional staff to move to rural Iowa, particularly because of the spousal/partner employment issues I’ve already mentioned. It’s also very difficult to get non-local staff in other professional areas (such as IT) for similar reasons, at whatever level.

It’s not until we get to mid-upper-level professional staff, people whose salaries are in the range of associate professors, that the attractiveness of our positions overcomes the challenge of our location for many potential hires. It has nothing whatever to do with how we value non-teaching staff (by the way, I have about as many non-teaching staff reporting to me as I do faculty, maybe even more, and I work with them a LOT), but with the realities of hiring skilled people at relatively low salaries in a remote area with few spousal opportunities.

A large percentage of our professional staff are absolutely golden, and believe me, those of us in academic affairs know this very well indeed.
newcityinc

My company, new city, INC does this in the Boston area for companies and universities. We work with companies to help close the deal by showing recruits what their lives could be like if they moved here. We also do relocation assistance once they decide to move by helping with logistics but also making people feel embedded and connected to a community. We smooth the way for them by utilizing our resources to support and help them connect.

Having the family be happy and ready to uproot from their family and friends to a new life is a valuable part of the recruitment and relocation process. This article was spot on!
johnvknapp

Dear David Bellos –

As the editor of one of those journals “in your field” you no longer feel guilty about not reading (Style), I would hope you’d reconsider your disdain, or at the very least, not pass along the message of your rather modest interest to your literature students. While it is quite true that at a certain age, we all feel as if there is little new under the sun, your message, internalized by those just starting the professional academic life, could prove ultimately painful, both for them and for the profession at large. While it’s nice to get a steady stream of single articles from friends, what’s missing is what could be called the “browsing surprises,” where thumbing through a whole copy of a print journal, you might stumble across a bit of serendipity, an essay that you might not ordinarily consider interesting. Efficiency has some limitations and missing that potential trouve might be one such example.

I would even be happy to send you a free copy of a recent issue of Style if that might pursuade you to glance our way occasionally, close-by the cornflakes.

Cheers,

JVK
jrodenbeck

Delighted to observe that Professor Bellos’ reading habits parallel my own. I am 75. retired, and live in France. I subscribe to the New Yorker. the NYRB. the Economist and the IHT. (Our edition of the latter is printed in France a few miles from here. Since the news tends to arouse contempt or fury, I always turn first to the bandes dessinées.) I dropped TLS after it refused twice to allow my rejoinders to extraordinarily ignorant attacks on my own pieces. We have three local daily newspapers, of which I usually read one, and on Sundays I buy a copy of the Weekend FT. We occasionally buy Le Monde or Libé. I have no time to read professional journals and not much for literature.
sportss

500 million in endowment
jandam

Thanks. That explains a lot of their responsible behavior.