🏫 A DARPA for education

Mend don't end the US Department of Education by taking a page from venture capital

Nov 13, 2024

“President-elect Trump has repeatedly pledged to dismantle the Department of Education, a decision that could radically reshape learning across America.” - Axios, 11.13.2024

Would abolishing the $100 billion US Department of Education — it mainly gives money to K–12 schools, especially in poor areas, and manages student financial aid for college students — be an Up Wing thing (pro-productivity growth, pro-technological progress, pro-economic opportunity) or a Down Wing thing (the opposite of all that great stuff I just mentioned)?

Here’s the Up Wing context I’m using to answer this question: Think of the American economy as a vast, distributed supercomputer comprising many interconnected networks. We call these networks “companies, “cities,” and “universities.” (These networks generate economic growth by rearranging matter into more complex, valuable forms — what I call “processing information” in my 2023 book — like turning sand into semiconductors, the foundation of the Digital Economy.) Countries with larger, denser networks have higher "computational capacity" to create complex products and generate wealth. Key to economic growth is strengthening these networks and their connections.

At the heart of these networks are the most sophisticated information processors we know: human beings. To riff off the famous line from the film Soylent Green, economic growth is made from people. Networks of human minds, nourished by strong public policy, are the bedrock of innovation. That’s why, for instance, improving teacher quality by replacing just the bottom slice of teachers with merely average ones could boost US economic growth by nearly a percentage point.

This Up Wing vision leads me to suggest ending the Department of Education — well, at least as we know it. A radical 21st-century upgrade is the only realistic path forward if you’re dissatisfied with the status quo. Conservatives have been trying to kill the department since it was created in 1979 as a pricey sop to teachers’ unions.

Still, there simply aren’t enough votes in the GOP-dominated Senate to make it happen without also killing the filibuster. What’s more, as my AEI colleague Rick Hess recently pointed out, “There’s a contingent of Trump-aligned education conservatives who’d much rather use the department to promote their vision the same way the Obama or Biden teams did.”

Here are some ideas for a major Education Department revamp, courtesy of a recent analysis by Mark Schneider. He’s a colleague at AEI, professor emeritus at Stony Brook University, and formerly the director of the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the Education Department that evaluates federal programs and collects education data:

Student aid programs → Treasury Department. "With its FAFSA failure, the department has proven it cannot effectively administer student aid programs. Its extensive student loan portfolio must be moved to the Treasury Department — and this should happen regardless of the Education Department’s eventual fate.”
IES (research and evaluation) → National Science Foundation. "Moving IES into NSF would also allow the establishment of a unit like DARPA, but for education research and development... enabling better research using AI, machine learning and cutting-edge data science methods."
Regional education labs & Comprehensive Centers → Either merge or terminate. "There is far too much overlap between these and the Department of Education's Comprehensive Centers... the labs and the centers appear to be much the same program, just duplicated, thanks to bureaucratic bloat and turf wars."
National Center for Education Statistics → Bureau of Labor Statistics. "The current bureau has a long history of managing the collection and distribution of sensitive data and is committed to the timely release of information — which puts it in stark contrast to NCES, which is several years behind in releasing crucial data."
Remaining programs → State-controlled block grants. "This would enhance the role of the states, which are constitutionally charged with providing education and know better than the federal government what their students need."

The notion of an education unit modeled (closely, I hope) after the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency certainly gets my Up Wing sense tingling. DARPA is famous for its lean, fast-moving approach that is more Silicon Valley than Washington agency. Run by roughly a hundred project managers on short-term contracts, DARPA focuses on building practical solutions rather than conducting basic research. These managers assemble networks of outside experts to tackle specific challenges, keeping bureaucracy minimal. The results speak for themselves: DARPA can claim partial credit for transformative innovations including Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine, weather satellites, drones, stealth aircraft technology, and even the internet itself.

The version of DARPA for education floating around Washington is called the National Center for Advanced Development in Education and would have the goal of rapidly developing and implementing practical solutions in classrooms. As described in the New Essential Education Discoveries Act proposed last summer by US Sens. Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat, and John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, the NCADE would be “dedicated to developing and disseminating cutting-edge practices and tools – such as voice recognition software to assess emerging readiness gaps and dyslexia, and digital learning platforms – to help students recover lost learning time from the pandemic.”

As Schneider argues:

The NEED act is an opportunity to create a modern research organization focused on high-risk–high-reward work with the potential to dramatically change education R&D. Just as important, as NCADE succeeds, it will act as a “skunk works” that can lead to change across IES and in the nation’s education R&D infrastructure.

If there were ever a time to think about education R&D, it’s right now. A new digital technology has entered the chat, one with far more potential to revolutionize school and learning than PCs in the classroom or handing every student an iPad. Integrating artificial intelligence into our education system might be job No. 1 for an educational DARPA.

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Nov 13·edited Nov 13

DOE has been truly destructive and the money sent to schools has largely led to the metastasis of administrative staff in schools and not to any real improvement in children's education. Back when education was subsumed under HEW things were a bit better but the teachers' unions demonstrated their power and forced DOE over the line to perpetuate and further empower the teachers unions.

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Andy in TX

Nov 13

I love the ideas you list but they all sort of look like ending DOE - as all of the programs are moved elsewhere in the federal government or turned into block grants for the states. Which seems pretty much like ending the Department of Education. DOE has 4400 employees and a $68 billion budget. I'm guessing we'd need just a few dozen at most to run a block grant program. What am I missing that's "mending" here, rather than ending?

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