Spectrum Sales to Finance Education-Related Technologies

Three U.S. senators announced Thursday that they’ll move forward with bipartisan legislation implementing creation of a "Digital Opportunity Investment Trust (DO-IT)," that would fund research and development of new education-related technologies.

Govtech.net

The trust is recommended in a report, "Creating the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust: A Proposal to Transform Learning and Training for the 21st Century," http://www.digitalpromise.org/about/digital_gift/index.asp commissioned by Congress in February and released yesterday.

At a Capitol Hill luncheon, Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT) announced that he plans to introduce legislation implementing the trust as recommended by a report released today that Congress commissioned in February. Senators Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) joined Dodd in supporting the initiative. Organizers of the effort, including former FCC Commissioner Newton Minow and former NBC News President Larry Grossman, said the Dodd announcement "gives this effort a significant boost."

The DO-IT Trust will be funded, according to the report issued today, by a portion of the proceeds from the sale of electromagnetic spectrum, the public airwaves. "This legislation opens up a world of education technology essential to all Americans in the 21st century," said Dodd. "By establishing DO-IT, Congress would make a bold investment in preparing future generations with the tools they need to be successful in a world connected through information technology."

Snowe noted that "DO-IT will give us the opportunity to take the knowledge that resides in our country’s museums, libraries, universities and research institutions and make it uniformly available to every American from Presque Isle, Maine, to Juneau, Alaska. The resources available can educate generations of Americans in the 21st century and beyond."

"This report clears the way for a huge leap forward in education," said Durbin. "Twenty years from now, people will look at this report as the cornerstone of a 21st-century effort to improve teaching and learning. Like the Land Grant College Act, the GI Bill and the National Defense Education Act, the establishment of the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust is our generation’s unique opportunity to throw open the doors of education through technology."

"When fully implemented, the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust will revolutionize everything we do in education — from teaching children to read, to retraining employees who’ve lost their jobs, to teaching immigrants English as a second language," said Minnow.

"DO-IT will do for technology what the NIH does for health and the NSF does for science," added Grossman. "We spend nearly $1 trillion a year on teaching at all levels, but just pennies on research and development of new technological tools to teach and learn more efficiently."

"One significant contribution that will be made by the technologies envisioned by DO-IT will be better, cheaper and more efficient training of America’s ‘first responders,’" added Grossman. "We only need look at how the military has incorporated technology into the training of troops to imagine what a difference this concept could make in teaching first responders how better to assure our safety here at home."

http://www.govtech.net/news/news.php?id=2003.10.24-74554