Educators and legislators have dismissed the federal Race to the Top money and related competitions for education dollars as one-time gimmicks designed to push President Obama’s agenda on education.

James Shelton has some advice: Get used to it. Innovation, he said will drive reform in the new administration. “This is early training for what’s to come.”

As the assistant deputy secretary for innovation and improvement at the U.S. Department of Education, Shelton knows about what he speaks. Shelton  manages the department’s competitive teacher quality, school choice and learning technology programs. That will include what’s expected to be hotly contested  Invest in Innovation or I3 grants, a $650 million program  that will award school districts, in partnerships with museums, corporations and universities, with grants of $5 million to $50 million.

Shelton spoke this week to educators and business leaders at the HP’s Cupertino campus in an event sponsored by the Silicon Valley Education Foundation and TechNet, the high tech lobby.

Shelton, who once oversaw education programs for the Gates Foundation, is among the social entrepreneurs who are guiding policy for Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. They are promising a shift from compliance-driven regulation to a demand for data-driven results. Evidence, not rote formulas, will guide funding.  At least that’s the vision.

Government support to drive innovation is the norm in some sectors and agencies: NASA and the National Science Foundation in science  and the National Institutes of Health in medicine. The Obama administration is determined to use discretionary money to do the  same for education, he said.

The biggest challenge, he acknowledged will be scaling successful programs nationwide. It’s not apparent how that will be done.

Priorities won’t change

Technology  will be a key component. Within a few years, Shelton said, the drop in the cost of broadband and a shift to “cloud” or Internet-based computing will spur developments in individualized instruction . New, sophisticated assessments will track individual student growth and replace fill-in-the-bubble standardized tests.

What won’t change, he said, are the priorities contained in Race to the Top: developing effective teachers and principals; creating national standards and assessments; expanding the use of data; turning around persistently low-performing schools. They will be the core principles in the reauthorization of Elementary and Secondary Education Act, known as No Child Left Behind.

He was asked how school districts facing massive budget cuts and struggling to preserve basic programs can be expected to simultaneously change how they operate.

Shelton said it necessary and doable. For decades, money was increased significantly for education, with little to show in results – at least as measured by National Assessment of Education Progress or NAEP, the nation’s report card.

Now California is “ground zero”  for the nation in terms of funding cuts. It must figure out how to do things differently, because the alternative – layoffs and class sizes in the upper 30s – “is unconscionable.”

James Shelton, assistant deputy secretary of Education