Perspective:
Throwing Away the Technological Advantage

The United States is letting its educational system decay. As the world gets "flatter," not only are call centers and light manufacturing being outsourced, so too are jobs that require advanced education: medical diagnostics, advertising, and even research. If the nation expects to compete in this flat world, it needs education that is deep and strong. It cannot afford to continue to be far behind Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, Hungary,¹ or most of Europe.²

Current national policy will not significantly improve education. It is based on trying to extract better performance through coercion, while withdrawing support for innovation and improvement that could result in fundamental, lasting gains. This is nowhere more apparent than in support for educational technology.

Even though it is a leader in technology, this nation is failing to apply technologies that could generate huge improvements in learning. Technology will not be solely responsible for improving education, but it could be a key enabling force. It offers exciting new prospects for long-term educational gains. The articles in this issue give a taste of some of the transformative innovations that are possible.

In spite of the promise of technology, and the natural advantage the U.S. has in technological innovation, technologies are relatively underutilized in education. Compared to the personal computers of the 1980s, today's computers are millions of times more powerful, but educational applications have hardly changed. Technology, which has transformed business and government, has not realized its educational promise.

Educational technology utilization in schools is stalled for many reasons, many of which can be traced to the structure of American education: highly decentralized decision-making, stretched budgets, unfunded mandates, distrust of technology, and backlash from the too-plentiful examples of poor uses of technology. While these historical and cultural barriers to better use of technology will not soon change, federal leadership and funding for educational technology can be changed.

The most important federal role in education is to foster innovations that might have significant national impact. Federal agencies should focus on innovations that are too expensive, require too long to develop, and are too speculative for states, schools, and business to develop. If these innovations prove their worth, they will impact every student in the nation. There should be funding for all stages of innovation, from research-based development to small-scale testing and revision, then large-scale testing, and ultimately national dissemination. Funding should be available in stages, anticipating the loss of innovations that do not pass each level. Funding strategies should anticipate that the process requires a decade or more.

Surprisingly, in spite of its obvious educational promise, there is essentially no federal funding of any of these steps for educational improvement that depend on innovative technology. The National Science Foundation is uniquely qualified to be the primary sponsor of the nation's innovations in science, technology, and mathematics. Yet, the federal budget currently under consideration slashes NSF education funding by over $100M, or about 12% of its current level.

Now that federal funds for innovations in educational technology have dried up, we are coasting on the technology investments of one and two decades ago. Many technology-based innovations are simply not being explored. As a result, we are throwing away a rich resource that could be making huge contributions to improve education, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and math. Unprecedented computational and communication resources could allow educators to teach more, earlier, more deeply and thoroughly, with richer connections between subjects and the real world. We need a national effort to harness these capacities, turn them into innovative approaches, study their value, and ensure that the best are used widely.

FOOTNOTES

¹ Science scores of eighth graders in the TIMSS 2003 study, see http://nces.ed.gov/timss/
² PISA 2003 results, see http://www.pisa.oecd.org/