Among the participants in our recent Lab with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum was Adam Frankel. After serving as a senior speechwriter with the Obama administration, Frankel went on to become the executive director of Digital Promise, a non-profit organization created by the federal government to promote cutting-edge research in education.

Given Frankel’s unique pedigree, we decided to reach out to him in advance of our Lab with NASA, which will focus on how to re-claim the public’s fascination with the agency’s projects. In the following interview with Content Director Andrew Benedict-Nelson, Frankel discusses the factors that made the Moon Shot possible and how a massive space project might look different this time. He also explains the work he is doing at Digital Promise and shares his thoughts on the ideas that emerged from the Lab with the Holocaust Museum.

Andrew Benedict-Nelson: Before we get into the ideas discussed in the Labs, could you tell me a little bit about Digital Promise and how you got there?

Adam Frankel: For the past four and half years, I was a speechwriter with President Obama. I was the second speechwriter hired, and joined the campaign shortly after he announced. It was obviously extraordinary and a dream job. I worked with him on many of his education speeches. I saw speechwriting as a way to express my own sense of activism. I eventually made a judgment that I wanted to move closer to the point of action in education. That’s what led me to Digital Promise.

Digital Promise was created by Congress in 2008 as part of the Higher Education Act signed into law by President Bush with bipartisan support. The explicit mission is to provide comprehensive education research and development that can help harness information technology to help learners at all levels get the skills they need to compete in a global economy. The board is made up of prominent figures from tech, education, media, and elsewhere.

ABN: Could you tell me a little bit more about what you mean by “research and development”?

AF: There are all kinds of problems in the education system that we talk about every day, like those the president would talk about in his speeches. Those problems range from things like teachers getting laid off to falling and stagnant test scores, those kinds of huge challenges.

But there is another problem which is as great as any of those, and over the long term, certainly as consequential, and it doesn’t get as much attention. That is the lack of R&D in education. An investor can spot a growing industry based on how much they put into R&D. You can tell they have a future if they’re investing in their future.

We don’t really do that in education in any meaningful way. The best estimate is that we spend less than a fraction of one percent on R&D – that includes government work, it includes some things being done by universities, and, to the extent that we know about it, it includes the private sector.

By R&D, I mean a couple of things. It can be education research in the most traditional sense: finding out what works in a classroom and what doesn’t. It also means emerging fields like educational neuroscience. We now know more about how human beings learn than at any point in history.

So what I’m interested in is fixing this broken link between what we know about what works and what we’re actually doing in classrooms. We’re looking for cutting-edge, rapid, real-time evaluations in classrooms. We’re working with Roland Fryer, the Harvard economist who just won a MacArthur genius grant, in order to do that in dozens of schools across the country using cutting-edge data analytics. We’re talking with neuroscientists about better ways to analyze their data.

There’s an extraordinary opportunity here for game-changing innovation in education. When you ask people about salient issues in education, they’ll mention school choice and other things like that. What we’re interested in doing is not just trying to have an impact on some of the education issues, but fundamentally shifting the landscape in such a way that we expand the number of options, giving kids whole new sets of options that do not even exist today. We can take learning science and leverage it with technology to give people the most precise education that has ever been possible.

ABN: I’d like to turn to the Lab you participated in with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. A big idea that emerged from this Lab was that museums can now curate not only their exhibits, but the way people react to and act upon their exhibits out in the world. Would you agree with that? What implications do you think that has for education?

AF: There is certainly an ability to give me people the opportunity to define and describe what they have gained and learned and taken away from a museum, and to show the impact the museum is having on all the people who come visit it. The institution has a legacy that inhabits all the people who experience it. That is possible today in a way that it never has been.

I know that Elie Wiesel had early on called the museum a “living memorial,” and that’s a beautiful phrase. But now you actually have the ability to make it more than a phrase, in part because of the use of technology.

It may be different for the Holocaust Museum than for other types of institutions. The other day I saw the Degas exhibit that is now here in DC – I don’t know that that will inspire me to go take up ballet. The expectations for this museum are very different. I think the opportunity to track the impact they have on people has an ever higher level of importance than for other museums. It’s more essential to their mission.

ABN: So let’s say you port this over to education – you take out “museum” and put in “classroom” or “lecture” or some other educational experience. It seems really powerful to say that you are now responsible for tracking and interacting with students’ knowledge after they leave the room.

AF: That’s part of what’s really exciting about the stuff we’re doing.

You know, I should say that there are people who are out there on the front lines of education who are dealing with this issues in a profound way now. But part of what Digital Promise is about is defining what the future should look like and help bring us closer to that. What you just mentioned is an important part of that future. It’s not just the future – it’s happening in a lot of places right now. But scaling it up in a meaningful way is a part of the challenge we’re focused on.

In particular, we now have the ability to track kids from a very early age all the way through college or even beyond. With that ability comes an extraordinary potential to identify what worked and what did not work in that individual person’s education. You can see where grades improved, where they went to college, then draw inferences from how other kids did in the same class. Then you can say, “Maybe we should take a second look at that teacher,” or “Maybe that teacher should be rewarded.” And not just teachers – once you have that kind of aggregated, longitudinal data, you can get far more precise measurements of what kind of interventions can make a real difference.

That is part of the greatest promise of this field right now. People talk about educational technology as if it has to be a computer or some other tool in the classroom. But that’s not even close to the way I think about it. I think about all of the things we can do to help teachers do their job better everyday that are a result of technology – not how we add a layer of work, but how we help teachers more effectively do what they entered the profession to do.

Imagine not just having all that educational data, but neuroscience data. Universities are compiling all sorts of data about how people learn and how to teach – everything from the best time in their lives to learn a certain subject to the best time of the day to learn it. The ability to collect and analyze this data is one of things on the frontier of education in the 21st century.

ABN: You know, once we started talking about the Holocaust Museum as the center of this kind of network for change, it became difficult to use that word “museum” anymore. Do you feel like we’re going to have similar difficulties with words like “classroom” and “school” and “university,” given all the things we’re going to be able to do in the world that are actually outside of those settings?

AF: Yes. We’re having those discussions. A lot of people talk about “flipping the classroom.” You would do the lecture for the class through a Khan Academy-style video that you could watch the night before. Then the time in class would be for working one-on-one with students as a coach. That’s one model – I’m not going to say I know what the best model is. But there are certainly opportunities to fundamental re-think the way education is done, as well as to fix big, systemic problems in this country. That conversation is bubbling up all over the country.

Now, the status quo is pretty entrenched. And traditionally it’s been harder to make some of these changes through technology in education that it has been in other sectors. But that doesn’t mean the potential isn’t there.

ABN: What excites me about the world you describe is all the interesting new choices we’re going to have to make. But it seems to me that when you actually talk with the average person about the issues they think are most important in education, their concerns are not oriented in that way – they’ll give you issues as varied as the teaching of evolution to unionization to vouchers to… you name it. It seems like the rhetoric and the cutting edge are very far apart. You understand rhetoric – what do we do about that problem?

AF: There are a couple of things I’d say about that. The first thing is that when you talk with regular folks about the problems in education, what they’ll probably tell you about are not even the issues you mentioned. They’ll probably talk about how their kid is having trouble in school or how they are cutting social studies classes or music classes because of budget cuts. It’s personal and local, and that’s as it should be. It’s for folks like us to think about the longer term and what the education system could look like tomorrow.

Nationally, the issues you mentioned have less to do with education than with politics and political polarization. We’ve been stuck in some of those same debates about education for a long time. If we’re serious about breaking out of some of that gridlock going forward – as we’ll need to break through it in order to stay competitive – then we’re going to need to shed some of those old shibboleths. We’ll need to get beyond “teachers unions vs. reformers” and things like that, then put our heads together and upgrade the way we’re doing things.

The other thing I’d add is that it’s not just education. You could take almost any issue today, and you’d find that not only is the national debate more polarized, but it is about different things from what the people who actually work on the issues on a day-to-day basis know we really should be talking about. It’s more reflective of the brokenness of our politics than anything else.

ABN: It’s strange, though – you could imagine a society where we were having frequent debates about modernization and progress versus tradition. Society has had those kinds of debates before. But it seems as if in contemporary life we usually have two sides who are very angry at each other and then a group of people who are interested in innovation who have very little to do with them.

A good example is health care. There are so many interesting innovations going on in the delivery of health care that have nothing to do with the question of whether we have universal health care or not. But because of the polarization around that issue we rarely discuss them or their implications.

AF: Well, but this is where the political process can actually get some stuff done. There were obviously lots of constituencies calling for the coverage of tens of millions more people. It was also the right thing to do. But in the process of doing that, the health care reform package also included a whole bunch of pilots for some of the most innovative things happening in medicine right now. So there are ways in the political process to bridge both the folks who are thinking about day-to-day issues in their communities and the folks who are thinking about longer-term efficiencies.

Atul Gawande, who does a lot of interesting writing about medicine, recently had a piece about some of the early pilot programs related to agriculture in the early part of the 20th century. They ended up having far greater consequences for good than many of the more visible  parts of the bills in which they were included. Some of the great things that will come out of the health care reform are those innovative pilots.

ABN: And those are things that will never even be taken up by, say, the Supreme Court when it decides on the constitutionality of the bill.

AF: Exactly.

ABN: So I’d like to turn this conversation about innovation to our upcoming Lab with NASA. I have a premise I’d like to test. We have this idea that there was a set of conditions that existed roughly between the end of World War II and the end of the Apollo program that made space exploration seem like it was vital to the national interest. Everyone could feel invested in it. Now here’s part two – we want to imagine that right now there is a different set of conditions that, if arranged properly, could lead to equal or greater interest in space exploration. So first question – do you accept the premises of the exercise?

AF: I don’t know. Obviously there were distinct conditions that gave rise to it, namely Cold War competition and some bold presidents. I worked with Ted Sorenson on his memoir for a number of years, and he sort of spearheaded that whole effort within the White House. He writes about it in the book. You had to set big goals that seemed unreachable to a lot of people at the time. I don’t think the power of leadership there should be overlooked.

ABN: I’m curious about the Kennedy moment. I think it is difficult to imagine Obama or any president today giving a speech like the “we choose to go to the Moon” address at Rice and having a proportionate reaction. It’s not just a question of whether the speechwriters are good enough – it feels like there is no venue where this could happen. Would you agree?

AF: No, I don’t think I agree with that. We’re certainly a more cynical and ironic culture. There’s a layer of cynicism that would have to be pierced that you wouldn’t have to deal with in 1962. I’m trying to think of what the corollary would be. Everyone uses the Moon Shot as a metaphor for policy efforts today – usually it’s with things like energy. The question is whether the president can give a speech in which he or she calls on the country to meet a goal that seems unreachable. I think that’s absolutely possible. That’s a responsibility of leadership.

ABN: Still, it seems like in that speech Kennedy spoke to a certain group of ideals as well as practical concerns in that speech at Rice University. What do you think might be the rhetorical equivalents that would be called upon in a speech about, say, going to Mars?

AF: But it totally depends on the context. I think he first announced the Moon Shot in a speech to Congress. Then he took it on the road. But as far as how you would do it today, it’s hard to answer without knowing the immediate context.

ABN: Well, that would raise the question of choosing the context. In the 1960s Rice was probably a very symbolically powerful place to give a speech like that. Let’s say we’re talking about going to Mars. Would there be a reason to give the speech from the offices of Google? What would be a powerful place where you could give it that wasn’t available in the 60s?

AF: First of all, I don’t think that goal would excite people. But in general I think you want to be around people – that’s my general philosophy about speeches, especially ones where you want to inspire people. So I don’t know that Google would be the best setting. A university setting still provides a good crowd.

ABN: So you mentioned the Cold War and you mentioned Kennedy. And if you ask people why we had such a strong period for the space program, those are the two factors most people mention. I’m wondering if you think there are any important factors that we’re leaving out?

AF: I think every generation has its new frontier, the thing that captures the imagination. It was a New World at some point for folks in Europe. At this point, space is not that anymore, unless there is some sort of extraordinary breakthrough that would make it possible to do more than go to another planet.

I think it also had something to do with some of the people involved: the cream of the crop, those Air Force pilots, those astronauts, “The Right Stuff.” I think that had something to do with it. It put a face on it that could inspire people.

There’s also the fact that the capacity to do it was new. But I don’t know that there is a big reason beyond the obvious ones. The Cold War context and Sputnik – that was very real to people. I think the other reasons are not as significant.

ABN: I think there may be one more. In the postwar era, there was significant faith in vertically integrated organizations like the corporation. NASA was another successful example – people imagined everything being well-coordinated by the big brains in Mission Control.

AF: There was greater faith in government too.

ABN: Right. But I think people also explicitly compared the kind of expertise and control being exercised by corporations to NASA. But today, not just our culture but our economy has shifted away from faith in “the organization man.” We have faith in entrepreneurs and people who shake things up. If that’s true, what the heck do we do with this space program that looks more like an old-fashioned corporation?

AF: Well, I think the future of the space program has to be in things like citizen science, the maker’s movement, entrepreneurs, private space exploration. There’s a lot of cool stuff going on there.

ABN: What role would you see for NASA then?

AF: What could NASA do that the citizens and entrepreneurs can’t do themselves? That’s the question. You have a lot of these billionaires and entrepreneurs who are investing a lot of their own resources, but surely there are things that NASA with its resources and expertise can do that they still can’t. But what are they, and then how do you leverage the bottom-up approach together with them? I think figuring out that will tell you what the future of NASA is.

ABN: You mentioned earlier that you don’t think the idea of a “Mars Shot” would inspire people the way the Apollo program did. Why not, and what do you think would?

AF: What made the Moon Shot cool was not just that there was another extraterrestrial body that someone was going to step on – it was the first time anyone had done it at all. Before that were the first times going to space at all. I think just choosing another place for a person to set foot seems stuck in that old framework. It shows a lack of recognition of what really made the Moon Shot so exciting in the first place.

ABN: I think it was also uniquely suited to that vertical organization story – one big organization, one big goal. You know, maybe it’s just because I grew up with the stories and the Tom Hanks movie, but in a way I think the aborted mission of Apollo 13 is just as impressive as Apollo 11 when you think about the coordination of all the moving parts. Even when you think about the way Walter Cronkite described what was happening, people were impressed by what this powerful organization that presumably employed the smartest people in the country could do.

The point is that none of this was going to succeed or fail by accident. It was going to succeed or fail by careful planning and central control. That’s completely different from the ethos of an entrepreneurial culture, where failing forward and false leads are just a part of the game. It’s pretty clear that a bunch of failed projects don’t come together into the Moon Shot, but they did come together into the Internet. Do you think there is some equivalent for space?

AF: That I don’t know. I’m not sure what the realm of things are. But when JFK challenged us to go to the Moon, he was essentially challenging NASA. Now that would be different. It would be the president calling on NASA and all of the American people who are interested in this work.

ABN: The “we” is different, isn’t it?

AF: Yes, the “we” is different. That’s the opportunity. The opportunity to do what, I’m not sure.

ABN: What would you imagine NASA doing that would be relevant to you and the work you’re doing now?

AF: They are doing work that is relevant to me now. That do a lot in the area of STEM (education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). They’ve done all sorts of cool stuff that hasn’t gotten enough attention – they were some of the first to use prizes and award money to accomplish scientific goals. I’m sure if you did a deep dive there you would find that they are doing all sorts of interesting things no one knows about, which is usually the case for most government agencies. Certainly in education they’re doing some very powerful stuff.

ABN: So I guess the question is what is the Sputnik or other symbol that makes people realize that everyone needs that kind of education again.

AF: Well, I guess that’s what your Lab is for.

ABN: Is there anything else you would like to add?

AF: I just want to say that what you guys are doing is not only really important, but also a lot of fun and really interesting. Thank you for including me.