A Research Agency for Learning

A trillion dollars just doesn't buy you much quality these days. Take our nation's education system for example: the Dept. of Education estimates that between federal, state and local governments we spend nearly $1.13 trillion annually on 56 million kids spread across 14,000 school districts, 99,000 public schools and 34,000 private schools.

It is hard to believe that as massive and disorganized as this system is we could have ever imagined creating a high-performing educational system. So to cut through this complex bureaucracy, the Obama administration is actually proposing to co-opt reform ideas from none other than the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA, founded by President Eisenhower in 1958, has no labs, no working scientists or engineers, just independent-minded program officers that disseminate funds to a variety of high-risk, high-reward research projects.

This is a shift in the right direction: away from money to smarts. We have literally beaten the money option to death - today we are spending nearly twice as much per student per year (in constant dollars) than we did three decades ago, and with little progress to show for it. Education Secretary Arne Duncan made the point clearly enough: "Other high-performing nations have passed us by during the last two decades."

The Obama administration has already played the DARPA card before, creating ARPA-E in 2009 to identify and fund game-changing ideas in the energy sector. In just two short years, some of the nation's $151 million investment is beginning to pay off with radical new battery technology, ultra-low-cost manufacturing of solar panels, and even the effective use of compressed air for energy storage. These are not the kinds of ideas you get from big government.

So now with the U.S. consistently way below the international average on math proficiency and hovering at the average in science, the Obama administration has proposed creating ARPA-ED, a new agency within the Dept. of Education that will fund the development of education technologies and promote their use in the classroom.

Will an agency modeled on one intended to improve our national security actually work in the politically charged world of education? Rigorous science has sadly never held the same power and influence within educational circles that it has
enjoyed in the traditional DARPA community.

With the prospect of creating ARPA-ED, we are likely to experience a major clash of cultures. We have been all too polite when it comes to addressing the rapid decline of the American education system. There is too much at stake right now to shy away from the kind of radical re-thinking needed to effectively educate our children.

Of course many will decry the notion that substantive change in schools is tantamount to a social experiment on our children - something parents have historically feared. But let's be honest, our current system is its own experiment gone awry, one that has failed us as a nation.

Will ARPA-ED invent entirely new ways of learning, new ways of packaging vast amounts of information and, ultimately, new ways of thinking? If it gets funded by congress, time will tell. But just remember that few in the elite chess world thought a computer could beat one of the greats of all time, and in 1997 we put that myth to bed. And Watson just showed the world that silicon and software could out-think the best "Jeopardy" had to offer. I can't imagine third grade will be any tougher.

Geoffrey C. Orsak is Dean of the SMU Lyle School of Engineering. He can be reached at dean@lyle.smu.edu.