White House Floats New Education Research Initiative

As part of a drive to ramp up education innovation, the White House in its proposed budget for the 2012 fiscal year called for creating an education research initiative modeled on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the government agency best known for creating the forerunner of the Internet.

While details of the ARPA-ED project are still under wraps, James H. Shelton III, the U.S. Department of Education’s assistant deputy secretary for innovation and improvement, said the agency would follow DARPA’s research model, which differs from that of traditional education research groups like the Institute of Education Sciences or the National Science Foundation. DARPA operates outside of typical grant frameworks, using interdisciplinary teams and contractors working on projects to apply emerging technology to specific problems.

“The notion is to fill a critical gap we have in the r&d infrastructure for education—the ability to do directed development, the way DARPA does, using cutting-edge technology and research to solve specific high-leverage...