Local control has prevented education from attracting the research and development that accelerates progress in almost every other human endeavor. Why? Because the benefits from scale that drive such activities elsewhere are absent. There are 15,000 curriculum departments in the country, for example—one for every district. None of them can afford to invest in understanding at a deep level what works and doesn’t work in, say, teaching reading to English language learners.
The federal government should use a portion of its higher investment to pursue an R&D agenda equal to the education sector’s needs. As Chris Whittle, the founder of Edison Schools, has argued, it doesn’t make sense that the feds spend $28 billion on basic research yearly at the National Institutes of Health, but only $260 million—1 percent of that—on R&D for schooling. Whittle argues persuasively that $4 billion a year on such innovation could begin “to move our schools—and our educational results—to another level, just as we moved from the candle to the light bulb, from the prop plane to the jet."
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