U.S. House of Representatives: Committee on Energy and Commerce, Republicans Prepared Witness Testimony: Grossman, Lawrence

Prepared Witness Testimony
The Committee on Energy and Commerce

H.R. 1320, the Commercial Spectrum Enhancement Act
Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet
March 25, 2003
2:00 PM
2123 Rayburn House Office Building

Mr. Lawrence Grossman
Co-Chairman
Digital Promise Project
37 West Twelfth Street
New York, NY, 10011

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for inviting me to appear before you this afternoon. My name is Larry Grossman, and I have appeared before you wearing other hats, most recently as president of NBC News, and many years earlier as president of PBS. Today I am here as Co-Chairman of the Digital Promise Project, a public interest initiative that my esteemed colleague, former FCC chairman Newton N. Minow, and I undertook on a pro-bono basis for the nation's major foundations, Carnegie, Century, Knight, and MacArthur. Mr. Minow very much regrets that his health does not permit him to travel from Chicago to appear here today.

Mr. Minow has asked me to commend the Chairman on behalf of both of us, for taking the lead in facilitating the reallocation of spectrum from governmental to commercial users. H.R. 1320 does it effectively and appropriately. The need for this action is evident and has been addressed by others. I want to speak today of an equally pressing need, and to propose that this committee has an unprecedented and unique opportunity to address in this bill, H.R. 1320, two of the nation's greatest, and very closely allied priorities - the defense of the nation and the transformation of the nation's education and training. Mr. Upton's bill creates a trust fund from auction revenues received for licenses for the commercial use of spectrum that Federal entities vacated, to reimburse them appropriately for their costs of relocating to new frequencies.

Mr. Markey has companion legislation that sets up a trust fund to meet society's crucial educational needs. Our request is to take advantage of this golden opportunity to marry the elements of both bills in a way that is the quintessential 'win/win,' that will provide a remarkable public dividend for both defense and education. We should pay for the reasonable relocation costs of the military and other federal users of the spectrum, and if auctions raise more than is necessary to cover those costs, we should re-invest at least some of those spectrum revenues into a parallel trust fund that will help transform education and training for the 21st century for all sectors of our society.

I have just come, Mr. Chairman, from speaking at a conference on the war and the media, sponsored by the Triangle Institute of Strategic Studies in North Carolina. The conference was attended principally by special forces officers - mostly instructors -- from Fort Bragg. What was striking to all of us were the profound effects that we could see this weekend, of how new information technologies have transformed the military and its conduct of the war, and how a similar revolution has taken place in the ability of the nation's press to keep the public informed of what is happening, as it happens, by means of computer generated intelligence, simulations, portable satellite dishes, video phones, lap tops, and other such recent IT breakthroughs. The comment was made by a number of those at the conference, that if only the nation's system of education and training could begin to take effective advantage of these information technologies, as the Defense Department and the press have already done, we could transform the quality and character of American teaching and learning as effectively as we've transformed the military and the media.

Even in times of national crisis and adversity, this country has had the foresight to insure that it will prosper in the future by making historic and transformative investments in education and training. History gives us guidance. In the period following the American Revolution, Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, which set aside public land whose revenues would support the creation of public schools in every new state. This was the genesis of the nation's pioneering system of pubic education.

In 1862, during the darkest days of the Civil War, again using the valuable public asset of public land, Congress passed and President Abraham Lincoln signed the Land-Grant Colleges Act of 1862, called by historian Alan Nevins the most farsighted Congressional legislation in the nation's history. It provided for the sale of public lands to support the establishment of a public college and university in every state, so that higher education would be accessible to farmers and workers, not just to the wealthy few. Today, the nation's system of 105 land-grant colleges provides the cornerstone of American higher education, and its creation heralded America's economic ascendancy into the industrial age.

In the midst of World War II, Congress made its third transformative public investment in training and education. It passed, and President Roosevelt signed the GI Bill, which sent millions of veterans to the college of their choice. This landmark educational initiative was instrumental in helping America become the world's economic and political leader and its most productive society. The wisdom of the nation's innovative investments in education in time of crisis has been borne out in each century of the nation's history.

Today, we stand at another time of great uncertainty and we also face the sweeping changes of the new information age. The citizens who are best equipped to succeed in this global, knowledge-based economy will need to have access to information technology, and will need to use information technology effectively as working and learning tools throughout their lives. Education and training have become the cornerstones of prosperity and success in the new century's knowledge-based economy.

The educational research and development trust fund we are urging you to include in H.R. 1320 would do for education and training what the National Science Foundation does for science, the National Institutes of Health do for health, and DARPA does for national defense. It will support and develop innovative uses of digital technologies that will enhance education, training, and life-long learning, and encourage our libraries, museums, universities, and school systems to move into the digital age. It would ensure that the nation's vast educational and cultural heritage, housed in our museums, libraries, and universities, will reach beyond their walls and into the home, school, and workplace, even in the poorest and most remote areas of the nation and the world. It would transform the Internet into an enriched tool for training, learning, and public participation.

Following publication of our report, DO IT has been endorsed by virtually every major national educational organization, library group, and museum organization, as well as by a large roster of CEOs of important high tech companies.

Earlier this year, Congress, under the leadership of Congressman Ralph Regula (R-OH), recognized the potential of the proposed educational trust, and appropriated $750,000 to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) for the development of the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust (DOIT), which Mr. Minow and I recommended in our report, "A Digital Gift to the Nation." Mr. Markey's bill calls it the Digital Dividends Trust Fund. We have similar goals. A substantial portion of the funds for DO IT that were just appropriated by Congress will complement other monies raised by FAS, in partnership with the Learning Federation, from industry, foundations, and other sources, for the development of a carefully crafted research roadmap that explores the opportunities for technological innovation to transform learning. This could form the basis for a full-fledged program, should such a trust fund be established in H.R. 1320.

The Educational Trust Fund will have a direct, and critically needed impact on the future of American society, just as the Morrill Act and the GI Bill did. The Trust will provide research and innovation in the areas of educational technology and training, just as the NIH provides research and innovation for health, NSF provides research and innovation for science, and DARPA for defense. In this knowledge-based economy, we cannot afford not to have national leadership and coordination of research and improvement for education, training and information technology. The educational trust will be essential to American competitiveness and security in the 21st Century.

Education: America must make a new investment to transform education for all citizens if we are to remain competitive in the new global knowledge economy. The leaders of the new information age will be countries that have successfully evolved from a manufacturing base to a knowledge base in all sectors of society. This means that our education system, pre-K through 16, post secondary, as well as workforce training, require a transformation in teaching and learning that fully integrates advanced strategies using technology and digital information.

Jobs: America is losing jobs to workers overseas because we don't have a competitive, national IT training infrastructure. The National Policy Association forecasts that 3.3 million US IT industry jobs will go overseas in the next 15 years, costing the American economy $136 billion in wages. The new global knowledge-based economy requires citizens to have greater skills in using information technology and higher levels of complementary knowledge in reasoning, problem solving, effective communication and collaboration for jobs in all sectors of the economy. Employers require skilled and professional workers. All of our systems of education and training must provide world-class skill sets in these areas, and they are not.

Security: Homeland Security requires education and training on an as needed basis to deal with possible emergencies, threats and dangers. After September 11, there is an imperative for all citizens to have access to and familiarity with information technology so that different modes of training and vital information can be imparted quickly, effectively, at any time. Safe and successful evacuation procedures, emergency procedures in the event of nuclear, chemical or biological threats, and effective training for first-responders now depend on coordinated, advanced communication technology. All citizens must be able quickly and competently to understand and utilize such technology.

Life-long Learning: America must provide every opportunity for our senior citizens to remain productive, contributing members of society. The Social Security Administration estimates that by the year 2030 more than 70 million Americans will be over the age of 65 - that is double the number of seniors we have today. With life expectancy estimated to soon reach into the 90's, there will be insufficient resources to provide social security and other services to seniors unless they remain self-supporting and self-sufficient far longer into their lives. Digitization and flexible education and training through technology make it possible for "non-traditional learners" in urban and rural areas to change, adapt, extend careers, and become productive citizens over a much longer period during their lifetime.

Democracy: Democracy thrives when an educated citizenry has access to information and the critical thinking skills to make informed choices. It is not enough simply to be connected to the Internet - putting information into context must go hand in hand with the availability of content. In order for Americans to be well informed in a world that is globally interconnected we must develop the skills to understand, order and review an explosion of scientific, cultural, political and economic information. Research and innovation in education are essential national priorities today. Our classrooms and classroom practices look fundamentally the same as they did one hundred years ago; we must transform the way we teach and learn to meet the needs of Democracy in the 21st Century.

What types of projects can an educational trust fund to meet these needs?

Visualization, Modeling, and Simulation would enable students to learn by doing to better understand difficult or abstract concepts and apply what they learn in real-world contexts.
Virtual worlds could offer sophisticated content and challenging activities that, like popular communications media, are more appealing, and engage individuals for large amounts of time. In the words of education Professor James Guthrie of Vanderbilt University, "Properly used, computer-assisted instruction can enable students to learn more and faster....When it [works] students benefit from interactive and online-linked instruction, and gifted teachers.construct creative, real-world spreadsheet problems and computer simulations for their classes."
Intelligent Tutoring Systems could assess student strengths, weaknesses, and mastery of subject material; generate instruction material tailored to the progress of an individual student; serve as an "expert" in a subject matter area; and use a variety of pedagogical approaches - explanations, guided learning, and coaching among others.
Large Scale Digital Libraries and Online Museums could offer a mind-boggling array of multimedia information objects and digital artifacts for student, teacher and scholarly use, and for building engaging curricula and learning experiences. The Smithsonian's "American Memory Project," is already having extraordinary impact in teaching our nation's history, but it is only beginning to scratch the surface of what can be made available to every school in the nation.
Distributed Learning and Collaboration could provide learners with unparalleled opportunities for access to courses globally that integrate rich multi-media curriculum, expert instruction, and peer collaboration.
Learning management tools could help students, teachers and other education professionals better manage learning opportunities, assignments, and tasks, scheduling analysis of student performance, interventions of teachers and other education professionals, teacher parent communications, student account management; and student portfolios.

These technologies and their potential applications in education and training promise a significant departure from our experience with education technologies. To date, much of the use of technology in education has involved imitating or supplementing conventional classroom based approaches- merely putting textbooks on CD-ROM and lectures and syllabi on the Web. Rather than offering interaction, immersions, or presence, most interactivity is limited to point and click web page references.

How will the educational trust (DO IT) help to overcome existing barriers to meeting these goals?

It will fund much-needed research and development in the areas of information technology, software design, the process of cognition, learning and memory.
It will help fund the digitization of America's libraries, museums, universities and other scientific and cultural repositories to preserve the foundations of American history and learning and to develop the most comprehensive learning experiences for the future.
It will serve as a center for national leadership and coordination among business, university and Federal initiatives in these areas, which are currently operating without coordination or integration. It will provide grants and contracts to those in the private, for profit sector as well as the nonprofit sector. At a September 2002 summit convened by the Department of Commerce and Department of Education all stakeholders, representatives of Education, Government, Industry, Technology Companies, Libraries and Museums, as well as the Department of Defense, agreed that national leadership and coordination across all sectors is an essential priority to making their efforts more rational and effective.

There are many who would say that we cannot afford to take on this task at this time. I think we cannot afford not to. Certainly, we need to begin, start modestly, as we did with past great educational initiatives in our history, and then build through the years.

The now famous Hart-Rudman Report on Homeland Security categorically states: "Americans are living off the economic and security benefits of the last three generations' investment in science and education, but we are now consuming capital. Our systems of basic scientific research and education are in serious crisis, while other countries are redoubling their efforts. In the next quarter century, we will likely see ourselves surpassed, and in relative decline, unless we make a conscious national commitment to maintain our edge. In this Commission's view, the inadequacies of our systems of research and education pose a greater threat to U.S. national security over the next quarter century than any potential conventional war that we might imagine. American national leadership must understand these deficiencies as threats to national security. If we do not invest heavily and wisely in rebuilding these two core strengths, America will be incapable of maintaining its global position long into the 21st century."

And for the Administration, Undersecretary of Commerce Philip Bond said in a recent speech, ".advances in technology and knowledge generation will radically transform the very nature of how we grow our economy and how we compete. Growth, jobs, and the competitive edge will go to those nations, those regions, those communities, those companies, and those individuals that can most quickly and most effectively generate, capture, manage, and apply knowledge."

Sec'y Bond went on to say:... "Our coming challenge is to use technology to foster change throughout the entire continuum of learning, both formal and informal. This is beyond getting computers into the schools, beyond getting the schools hooked up to the Internet, and beyond today's debate about deployment of entry-level broadband. This is about much bigger change-a new learning infrastructure."

The funding support for DO IT is modeled after the Northwest Ordinance and the Land-Grant Colleges Act of previous centuries. It, too, would use revenue from public assets - the electromagnetic spectrum, the 21st century equivalent of the public lands of previous generations - for vast educational benefit to future generations of Americans in every state. The trust, which you could help create today, would use revenues from portions of the publicly-owned spectrum. A portion of the proceeds from the commercial exploitation of this public asset would be enough to endow the Educational Trust and create a great legacy for the nation's future.

The Trust will serve as a kind of venture capital fund for educational institutions, enabling them to become true participants in the digital age. Great Britain, Japan, Singapore and other nations are already working on such initiatives, and America must not fall behind in this next great wave of educational progress. The strength of our democracy and our economic competitiveness depends on it.

In closing, we urge you to support the creation of two trusts in the legislation you will report from this committee. The first rightly reimburses the costs to the military and other federal entities for moving. By creating the second Trust, this Committee will lead the way in transforming education and training for future generations of Americans.

When we first discussed this idea with Senator Stevens, he replied, "I really get this. I went to a land grant college, on the GI Bill. This is about the next generation." And it is.

I thank you for your time and would be pleased to answer any questions you may have.