There's a lot to like about this Los Angeles Times op-ed by Newark Mayor Cory Booker, NewSchools Venture Fund CEO Ted Mitchell and iconic investor John Doerr. Hooray for innovation in education! Yes to national standards and tests! But the trio's faith in the federal government's ability to promote good things in education seems to have missed the entire point of the NCLB era:
The federal government, through the NIH (and other programs such as the National Science Foundation, the Small Business Administration and the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency), has proved that it can multiply innovations in many fields and spread the most successful ones. Yet, historically, the federal government has constrained its investment in education entrepreneurship to comparatively small, isolated programs, limited efforts in a bureaucracy that resists change. To fix this, there are key steps the next president should take.
The first is to expand innovation incentives and free them from the earmarks and conditions that have blunted past initiatives. Too many innovators spend too much time and energy raising money to stay afloat and expand. Adequate incentives, coupled with rigorous accountability, would remedy this. We should include two complementary programs, a "Grow What Works" fund and a fund to provide research and development money for promising early stage initiatives. Today, the federal government invests less than $1 billion annually in education innovation -- a paltry 0.2% of our $500 billion total national spending on education. Compare that to the $28 billion we spend on biomedical innovation, a full 1% of our $2.6 trillion on healthcare.
Beyond new funding, the federal government must use its influence over state and local policy to sweep away regulations that hamper innovative thinking, such as caps on the number of public charter schools allowed and excessive restrictions on how teachers are trained and credentialed. In addition, it can use the power of the purse to direct competitive funds to states that embrace urgent innovation. States control 70% of public education funding; a push for state support of entrepreneurial education efforts could have a huge effect.
As someone who helped to create the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Innovation and Improvement, surely I should laud these ideas. But call me skeptical, mugged by reality. The minute that federal officials place bets on any particular innovation, and use any sort of judgment, political opponents will scream with cries of cronyism and favoritism. (I speak from personal experience.)
What the federal government can do is provide competitive grants, such as those that flow from the Teacher Incentive Fund (which invests in local merit-pay programs), that might lead to changes that would otherwise be politically impossible. More such targeted grants in other areas might be worthwhile. But reformers would be wise to tone down their rhetoric and watch their promises. The federal role in education isn't suffering from too small an imagination but from an excess of hubris. That's the lesson from NCLB.
