Dodd, Snowe,
Durbin, Burns et al |
Yarmuth, Kennedy, Regula, et al |
Purpose: The Digital Opportunity Investment Trust (DO IT) will be a Fund essential to American education, competitiveness and security in the 21st Century.
The Trust will:
- Provide major financing for innovation, research, and development in applying advanced information technologies to transform education, skills training, and lifelong learning just as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health do for science and health respectively.
- Fund the digitization of collections and other significant holdings in our nation’s libraries, museums, universities and public television stations to make these riches available to rural, urban, and suburban America, as well as the rest of the world.
- Encourage America’s brightest researchers to partner with universities, museums, public service institutions and the corporate sector to develop innovative software-based learning models and prototypes to rapidly advance learning and information technology for the digital age.
Funding & Structure: DO IT will be structured as a Congressionally originated non-governmental agency with a nine-member Board of Directors, nominated by the House and Senate and appointed by the President. Grants and contracts will be awarded on merit. The Board and Director of the Trust will develop policies that follow the tested procedures of NSF and NIH. Congress will review the Trust’s budget and financial performance annually. The Trust will be a self-sustaining fund financed by the interest only on a portion of the proceeds from auctions of publicly owned telecommunications spectrum, beginning in 2008. The corpus will remain an asset in the Federal Treasury.
Twenty-one percent of the interest monies that DO IT receives will be forwarded to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for distribution through a competitive grant application process to qualified local public television licensees and other eligible entities. This Fund will:
- Support a new generation of learning and educational services aimed at meeting the nation's educational needs utilizing public television's digital broadcast infrastructure.
Precedents: Legislation for the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust follows the historic model of the U.S.’s other farsighted investments in education, enacted by Congress, that profoundly shaped the nation: the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 that also used revenue from a publicly owned resource, the public frontier land to create our public K-12 system; the Land Grant College Act of 1862 that opened higher education to all, and the GI Bill of 1948 that gave 20 million American servicemen and women brilliant educational opportunities after WWII. By establishing DO IT, Congress would again make a bold investment in education for the new century, financed by revenue from a publicly owned resource, to prepare future generations for a world globally connected through information technology. |
