Danny Curtis, producer of the Future of Education podcast, joins me on the “mainstage” to discuss a new bill introduced recently in the Senate that would increase Research and Development in the Department of Education. We discussed the bill’s potential to spur learning innovation, the demand-side challenges to adoption, and systemwide reforms that can support in addressing those. Danny will be making more appearances in the weeks and months ahead, so I’m thrilled to introduce him to you all here by video.

Michael Horn:

Welcome to the Future of Education. I am Michael Horn, and you are joining the show where we are dedicated to a world where all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. And over the past year and a half, it's been really fun because I've had a partner in crime on this. He's been largely behind the scenes, although we have bylined some articles together. So you’ve seen his name pop up in different things, different forums, but he has literally been overseeing all of my digital products, all the digital work that I do. He's helped bring up the quality a ton, but he also happens to know a lot about education as we'll get into it in a moment. He's none other than Danny Curtis. Danny, thanks so much for actually coming on the live stage and showing your face to the audience today.

Danny Curtis:

Thanks, Michael. It's great to have the chance to step in front of the mic today.

Danny’s Journey to the Work

Michael Horn:

Well, why don't you tell folks about yourself? Because part of this idea is we want you to be in front of the mic a little bit more, either riffing with me, bylining with me, or maybe even interviewing some guests. I know you've done one interview that’s super interesting coming down the pipeline, but why don't you give people a taste of, you know, your background, your experience in education specifically, and workforce issues as well. Before you and I teamed up to start doing some of this work together.

Danny Curtis:

Well, outside the work that you and I have done, Michael, I have also worked in education workforce policy, as you mentioned, at the state and local level, and a nonprofit, all towards designing systems that do a better job of connecting learners to opportunity. And got my start in this work as a high school English teacher in California, where I met so many inspiring people, teachers, administrators, students, and saw incredible work being done and also noticed the ways that that work was constrained by outdated systems. And that's really what got me into policy to try and create that change. And it's also why the mission of the Future of Education, to unlock the potential of schools and students through innovation, why that resonated so strongly with me.

The New Essential Education Discoveries Act

Michael Horn:

Well, I appreciate everything, obviously, and let's dive in. There's a bill that has come up that you called my attention to has some bipartisan support. It's around research, I think. But why don't you give folks a flavor of what we are talking about and why it caught your eye and worth talking about here in the show?

Danny Curtis:

Yeah. So I wanted to talk about a bipartisan bill. I know, very rare these days, that has proposed increases to federal education research and development funding. That was introduced in the Senate at the start of August. It's called the New Essential Education Discoveries act, NEED for short. And it was introduced by Senators Michael Bennett, a Democrat from Colorado, and John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas. And it would develop a fifth center in the Institute for Education Sciences that they're calling the National Center for Advanced Development and Education. And it would be dedicated to developing, disseminating, investing in what they're calling high risk, high reward, cutting edge innovations in education. And that includes technologies, innovative learning models. And it also proposes some changes to the state longitudinal data system. But for today, we'll stick to the R&D and learning. Innovation specialists have long argued that one of the great challenges of implementing innovation in education has been the lack of research and development and supply stemming from that. The federal education budget allocates only about $2.5 billion to R&D in education, which sounds like a lot, but it's only 2% of spending on education in the federal government and like, two tenths of a percent of total education spending when you take state and local into account. It also stands in stark contrast to the R&D spending in other departments. Like one department that it's often compared to is the Department of Defense with their DARPA fund, which spends $79 billion a year. And so for those reasons, this bill has garnered a lot of interest from learning innovators and a lot of excitement, too.

Michael Horn:

Yeah. And I think it's great. Like, if we start putting more research on those big sort of home run questions, if you will, budget behind it, see what we can develop out of it, I think that makes a heck of a lot of sense. Not nearly enough R, as you said, in education. I mean, that's, you know, that's pennies on the dollar when you think about what you just said. And for a sector where so much is riding on it, look, we'd never do that in healthcare at this point, right? We invest a lot in R&D. It's incredibly important. Basic research is incredibly important. Solving the most intractable problems, incredibly important. I think all those statements apply to education as well. And frankly, I talk a lot about personalizing, customizing education. That's akin to precision medicine in the medicine field. But they went through this whole field or movement where they had empirical medicine, where on average, if you have these symptoms, you should do this treatment. And, yeah, it didn't work all the time. But it started to come out of RCTs before they've started to refine it more and more. It's funny. In education, we don't even have the empirical stage often even in place. We don't even know on average often what works. And we're sort of trying to leapfrog into the precision or personalized. We just need a lot more research on a whole host of things, not just science of reading, so that we can get much more precise. I love all of that.

The Education System’s Demand-side Differences

Michael Horn:

The one quibble I have is, and you didn't say it, but, you know, you hinted to it, which is that a lot of people compare this to DARPA, the defense advanced research projects arm that has given us the Internet, you know, GPS. Right. All those things. And I just, I don't love the analogy.

Because in DARPA, it's big, thorny problems you're trying to tackle with a relatively centralized buyer that is also federally funded. Right, as in the military service arms. And if DARPA comes up with something really interesting, you have a buyer that, yeah, I get procurement is broken in the military, but relatively speaking, it's nowhere near as insanely fragmented or idiosyncratic, frankly, as school districts are in America, where we don't only do a very bad job of understanding demand from the top down, frankly, what they’re going to demand, the problems that they think are most interesting are often different from place to place in unpredictable ways. And so thinking that we can crank out something and then theres going to be an at scale adoption, thats the only piece that I would say, like, lets go a little bit easier on that part of the D, if you will. But I still think the reps of basic research leading into something that actually produces a product. Its not just an academic report on a shelf that has a lot of value. I would agree.

Danny Curtis:

Yeah, yeah, you raised some really important points there. And I agree for the most part, not only is the education system far more diffuse, you mentioned the defense has a fairly centralized buyer. And schools, there are about 14,000 school districts around the country somewhere around that. And not only is it diffuse, but many of these school districts, most of these school districts are locked into an industrial paradigm of education that makes it hard for them to incorporate a lot of these innovations and therefore kind of suppresses demand. And there's historical precedent for these challenges that you're raising. In the 1990s, there was the new American Schools federal initiative that had a lot of the same R&D goals as the current one. In the Obama administration, there was the I3 initiative. Having said that, I do think that there are some factors at play here that point to maybe this time being a little different. Post Covid, I think there's a lot of. There's a renewed sense of urgency around supporting students to recover learning and maybe increase openness from that. I also think that the growth of new education AI tools and all of the buzz around AI has created a sense of excitement about learning, innovation. And then in the post secondary front, I think the wave of college closures that we've seen also increases a sense of urgency to try something new. And also included in the bill, there are measures designed to solve for this. There's a lot of discussion about these within the bill, about these innovations being community informed. And the plan for going about that is they would create these advisory panels and they'd be comprised of teachers, specialists, parents, students. And the idea there being that they want to ensure that what is being produced by this new center is solving for problems that exist in schools.And so they're kind of working to ensure that whatever is created there is a practical use for. But I think that stops short of necessarily solving all the demand problems that you're describing. But there is more that can be done at the state, federal, local level to stoke demand as well.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, and in some ways, let's have the breakthroughs and then we could figure out the demand side of the equation is, I think, part of the thinking that I think would be great anytime we can get researchers, frankly, they struggle often to get into districts to do really good research. If we can get researchers into districts with companies, those who can create product, I think that's all to the good, and I think would get me excited. I'll add one other thought, which is we also know that there's another bipartisan bill around research. It's much more around the model providers. Our friend Joel Rose and new classrooms has spoken about this in the past, and I think model providers are super interesting because they can also more readily rethink the industrial model itself. Which to your point, frankly, if you're trying to innovate within an industrial model context, the model can only prioritize those things which perpetuate it, not undermine or overthrow it. And so I think having model providers out there, deeply integrated, maybe frankly, what about an army of 200 lab schools, truly lab schools, not sort of John Dewey reprised, but like real lab schools paired with deep researchers at research universities, were not just the ed schools, but cognitive of neuroscientists, etcetera, could come in and really be playing in an integrated way with all the different inputs there. I think there's some very cool things when you get into really rethinking the model, integrating all the parts in very different ways.

Rethinking All the Parts Together

Michael Horn:

That's where the real breakthroughs, frankly, in any field come when you get to rethink all of the parts together. So, Danny, that Bill starts to get into some of the out of the box providers that have been written about that, Joel's written about New Classrooms, has written about, and a series of recommendations there for how we would start to get that really started as an engine of innovation in America's schools as well. Thoughts on that as we wrap up here?

Danny Curtis:

Yeah, I mean, you mentioned the Out of the Box report, so much good stuff in there on how the system can sort of more comprehensively, in addition to this R&D initiative, increase that demand and ensure successful implementation of innovations. And so looking at the federal level, I think there's a real opportunity here to create a grant and introduce funds that will facilitate the adoption of innovations by unburdening districts that decide to take these on of the costs of implementation and so helping them cover some of those startup costs for creating new schools and new classrooms that are going to be implementing new forms of learning, both state and federal level. There's an opportunity to change regulation, open up flexibility around testing and procurement so that districts can implement these innovations to their best ability or to their fullest potential rather. The California Math Framework that was immplemented this time last year stands out as a really good example of that to me. And then at the local level and at the school level, Michael, you write a lot about how difficult it is for an organization or a school to build the classroom of tomorrow while also operating the classrooms of today. And so I think schools can start thinking about creating those separate arms that are dedicated to innovation and dedicated to thinking up new ways of teaching and learning.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, it's a great point. It's a great point. Danny. Sorry, keep going.

Danny Curtis:

Well, I was just going to bring it back to your earlier point around model providers. We've already talked about the diffuse nature of, of our education system. So many districts doing so many different things. It can be really difficult to have your finger on the pulse of learning innovation when you are operating a school day in and day out and doing that difficult work. And so partnering with model providers who do have that landscape and have worked on implementing these new forms of teaching and learning across the country can be a great way to really get the ball rolling and ensure the success of implementing innovations.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, all of that makes a lot of sense. And I think, to your point, and we'll wrap up with this thought, is that as you start to have different arms, different educators coming to the table with space, time, and their only job is to create these new models and then find places for them, that makes sense, right? Asking someone to operate your classroom and innovate in a radically different way doesn't make sense. You never ask pilots to come up with new ways to build airplanes. That's insane. And similarly, I think with schools, frankly, that's true in healthcare, too. We're not asking the doctors on the front line to come up with the vaccines. They're giving input into the vaccines, but they're not actually doing that sort of work itself. That's where the researchers, the developers, et cetera, come together. Same principle here in some ways, like, it's surprising that we think, oh, you know, why aren't schools innovating more? Well, of course they aren't, because they're trying to operate the schools and serve the kids and like, of course you need other people to do it. So great set of points all around. Really appreciate you bringing this bill to the fore so we could talk about it, and we'll look forward to seeing you much more on the Future of Education. And for all of you tuning in, it'll be a relief because you won't just see my mug made for radio on the screen. You'll also get to see Danny. So thanks so much for joining us.

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