In a 2012 article in The New York Times called "China's Rise Isn't Our Demise," Vice President Joe Biden wrote a cogent summary of America's advantage in the world economy that has enormous implications for innovation in education.
"The United States is hard-wired for innovation. Competition is in the very fabric of our society. It has enabled each generation of Americans to give life to world-changing ideas - from the cotton gin to the airplane, the microchip, the Internet.
We owe our strength to our political and economic system and to the way we educate our children - not merely to accept established orthodoxy but to challenge and improve it... Our universities remain the ultimate destination for the world's students and scholars."
Nothing in Biden's article was new or surprising. Every American understands that our success in the world economy depends on education and innovation.
So why do we devote so little attention to innovation in education? The very orientations and investments Vice President Biden cited as the basis of our success in other fields are rarely applied to improving education itself. Instead of inventing our way to success, as we do in so many other fields, we keep trying to improve education through changes in governance, regulations, and rules, which never produce change in core classroom practices and outcomes. Every state's textbook adoption requirements specify paperweight, but never mention the weight of evidence behind the use of the book. Special education regulations specify that children be placed in the "least restrictive environment" but never the "most effective environment." Title I has reams of regulations about how funds can or can't be spent, but hardly a word suggesting that they be spent on programs proven to work.
The shelf of proven programs is steadily growing, due to investments at the Institute for Education Sciences, Investing in Innovation (i3), the National Science Foundation, and other government funders, as well as private foundation funders. Yet evidence and innovation continue to play an extremely small role in Title I, Title II, special education, and other federal programs, much less in state and local programs. A movement toward giving schools and districts more freedom in choosing how to use federal funding is a positive development, but local educators will need reliable information about proven, replicable programs to translate their new freedom into solid benefits for their children. Innovation based on research and development is what America does best. Isn't it time to dedicate ourselves to innovating our way to solutions of our longstanding educational problems?