I would like to begin by thanking the Committee for its long-term commitment to ensuring that the citizens of our country can share equally in the services made available by advanced telecommunications - enhanced ways to communicate, learn, do business, and be entertained. The strength of our democracy has rested from the start on the principle that we are a land of opportunity enabled by an extraordinarily diverse citizenry. But in our technologically sophisticated society, fast-paced change often puts the most expansive opportunities out-of-reach for many. The Committee's groundbreaking work on legislation that provides for innovation in and expanded access to high speed Internet services has contributed greatly to assuring that all Americans have an opportunity to contribute to the development of a strong and vibrant economy.

I have been a supporter of the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust, or DO IT, from the beginning. As alluded to by the Digital Promise report to the Congress, DO IT will do for education and training what NSF does for science. Let me explore from my vantage point as past National Science Board Chairman some of the parallels between the National Science Foundation and DO IT and explain why DO IT is so vitally important to our Nation at this point in time.

The Need For an Equivalent Education and Training Effort as for Science As the members of this Subcommittee know so well, something new and exciting is happening in the 21st century. We are in the midst of a new era of discovery, learning, and innovation. In the past two decades, our knowledge has expanded at a rapid rate; our world has grown more complex. Knowledge is now the principle source of wealth creation and new jobs in the U.S. and globally. This new knowledge-based economy has brought significant changes with profound implications for society. It has transformed the way we live and work.

These truths of our times and our broader national values demand that we embrace the imperative of preparing people to take advantage of these opportunities. We are talking about opportunities not only for individuals. We are also talking about ways to create expanded opportunities for the U.S. to compete and prosper.

Education and training have always been vital to the success of individuals. In today's knowledge-based economy, it is also an investment in our collective future as a nation and a society. The knowledge-based economy has placed new demands on education and training for all our citizens - not just K-12 schooling, but throughout a person's lifetime. There is a heightened sense of urgency to the task of identifying new learning and institutional strategies that will open the door to economic prosperity and improved well-being to the full diversity that is the face of America.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) focuses on building and sustaining a competent and diverse scientific, mathematics, engineering, and technology workforce. The scientific and technological leadership enjoyed by the U.S. today, is due in large part to the funding and programs of the NSF. There is also a critical need to for an educational paradigm that reflects the needs of a diverse population and addresses the humanities, the arts, workforce training, and all aspects of lifelong learning. DO IT will address this important need. The overarching objective of the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust is one vital to our nation's prosperity - to encourage, educate, and enlist citizens into jobs and professions that drive the new knowledge economy, contribute to social well being, and safeguard the basic values of our society.

DO IT as an Incubator for Innovation The NSF plays a vital role in nurturing the people, ideas, and tools needed to generate new scientific knowledge and new technologies. Federal investments in the basic sciences through the National Science Foundation have produced many benefits, including:

· New industries, such as E-commerce and biotechnology, · New medical technologies, such as MRI and genetic mapping, · New discoveries with great future promise in areas such as nanotechnology, cognitive neuroscience, and biocomplexity.

NSF has accomplished this by funding innovative, peer-reviewed science and engineering research, educating a highly skilled science and engineering workforce, and building partnerships with other federal programs, non-profits and industry to foster transfer of knowledge, methods and tools.

DO IT will play a similar role to foster a community of researchers and developers. DO IT will give academia, non-profits and industry the resources to develop learning content, methods, and models that will provide learners, teachers, and instructors with new tools. Some tools will be as basic as interactive digital aids to reading, writing, math, and languages, and some will be as sophisticated as simulations, visualizations, and distributed collaborative projects. Given an aggressive and successful program of research, computer simulations could let learners tinker with chemical reactions in living cells, practice operating and repairing expensive equipment, or evaluate marketing techniques. Simulations could make it easier to grasp complex concepts and transfer this understanding quickly to practical problems. New communication tools could enable learners to collaborate on complex projects and ask for help from teachers and experts from around the world. Learning systems could adapt to differences in student interests, backgrounds, learning styles, and aptitudes. They could provide continuous measures of competence, integral to the learning process. Such measures could help teachers work more effectively with individuals and leave a record of competence that is compelling to students and to employers.

The gap in student achievement is a major challenge before us and one that is central to the new No Child Left Behind legislation. Without new models and tools for teaching and learning, we are stuck in classrooms that haven't changed much since the turn of the last century, educating our children on an agrarian calendar schedule, with methodologies that do not fully integrate and utilize the technology that permeates every other sector of our lives. Imagine the impact that the ability to refine teaching techniques could have in truly changing outcomes when each child has a personalized learning plan, customized through technology, to meet his or her specific learning style. High student to teacher ratios, often the case in failing schools, would then not be such an impediment and testing would become much more capable of aiding learning. And new tools could allow continuous evaluation and improvement of the learning programs and systems.

DO IT will intensify and focus R&D to harness the power of advanced technology to improve learning. This is an area of R&D that is greatly unfunded given its importance to our nation. President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) in its Report to the President on Educational Technology (1997) reported that in 1995 the U.S. spent about $70 billion on prescription and nonprescription medications, and invested about 23% of this amount on drug development and testing. By way of contrast, our nation spent about $300 billion on public K-12 education in 1995, but invested less than 0.1% of that amount to determine what educational techniques actually work, and to find ways to improve them."

Emerging technologies make it practical now to approach learning in ways that learning scientists have advocated for many years. Unfortunately, the practices recommended by educational psychologists and cognitive scientists are not pervasive in our country's classrooms and training centers. Individualized instruction, subject-matter experts, and rich curricular activities are often simply too expensive. Expense and related challenges often cause both formal education and corporate training to rely on strategies that ignore the findings of learning research. For the first time in history, technology exists that can make vastly improved learning systems routinely available. Furthermore, networking bandwidth capacity, computational power, and graphics capability will improve dramatically in the next few years. We will have even more powerful, less expensive technologies available to support teaching and learning. But we will not be able to take advantage of these advances unless we undertake a long-term, large-scale effort to develop, test, and disseminate tools for building advanced learning systems. The R&D supported by DO IT will lead to a wide-range of interoperable, well-performing, extensible software tools that can lower the cost of entry for educational materials and systems. This will enable the types of learning I just described to become routinely available to Americans, both inside and outside of the classroom, in both urban and rural communities.

The funding programs supported by DO IT will develop a pipeline of well-educated researchers to contribute to this important field. Some of these researchers will become faculty members and help educate future generations of researchers. Many others will join the workforce to develop next-generation products and services to contribute to U.S. leadership in the education and training sector, in areas such as e-learning services and educational software publishing.

DO IT Structure and Governance I feel very confident endorsing the structure and governance model proposed in the Digital Promise's Report to Congress. It is important that the management structure provide ultimate accountability to the Congress, but also ensure that the management enjoys the stability and independence from political interference needed to guarantee the highest-quality product. The NSF provides a model for meeting this goal and the governance proposed for DO IT is, in general, modeled on this sound and very accountable structure. The NSF Director is appointed to a six-year term and reports to a strong, independent board. Similarly, DO IT would be overseen by a Board of Directors whose members would serve with the advice and consent of the Senate. The DO IT governing board would function much like the National Science Board, the governing board of the NSF. Like the National Science Board, the DO IT Board would be responsible for setting direction and budget guidelines and providing oversight of DO IT. The DO IT Board would be available to Congress whenever needed, just like the National Science Board. The Director of DO IT would be selected by, and serve at the discretion of, the Board of Directors.

Conclusion Mr. Chairman, I am convinced that the fifty -year plus legacy of the National Science Foundation has been the driving force in the overall leadership of the United States in the fields of science and technology. The nature of the world we face today requires that same kind of incubation of ideas and innovation in the areas of education and training if we are to remain a competitive global leader. My experience as a past Chairman of the National Science Board gives me every confidence that an entity such as DO IT can be effectively governed and structured so as to be thoroughly accountable to Congress and to the public trust. At this point I would like to close my formal remarks. I thank the Committee for allowing me to comment on the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust. I look forward to future opportunities for discussion of this highly important national initiative.