On paper that's interesting. I'm skeptical that the national government can do that well, however. The rollout of the ACA websites makes it clear that the government isn't good at producing that sort of product.

Furthermore, the premise of the article is that the government is very inefficient. I'm not sure $1.6M is a fair estimate for the cost of this sort of product. There are millions of teachers in the U.S. not to speak of parents, administrators, and kids.

I'm open to providing incentives to make this sort of progress more feasible. I'm partial to better support of open source software that meets these ends (like tax deductions for time or cash contributions to OSS projects the government uses).