Technology in Education: In the U.S. education system, what can the government do to best enable the use of new learning technologies?

Government's role in education is to manage funding and infrastructure; government has never been a source of innovation or a particularly good promoter of innovation. Furthermore, when the U.S. federal government has attempted to push standardization or centralization in education (No Child Left Behind or even Race to the Top), it has been almost universally unsuccessful in promoting positive change.

Thus, I'd suggest that the most powerful things the U.S. government can do to promote the use of new learning technologies in education would be: 

• Reduce barriers. Reduce or remove standardization requirements that require schools and local education systems to spend money in certain ways or on specific initiatives. Focus on a competency-based model of education where programs focus on the skills, knowledge and abilities that students will develop rather than on what standardized test they can pass.
• Enable flexible use of funding. As the federal government funds educational institutions it should permit the use of funds on use of technology or other initiatives that  institution managers deem important.
• Highlight successful case studies. The federal government has an awfully big soapbox. They could certainly function as a clearinghouse for sharing successful innovations or efforts nationwide.Update: In a comment on this answer, Craig Montuori points out:

The spread of best practices in education seems to be a huge problem, especially in higher education, with the standard tension between research and education at many top institutes. MIT Professor Rohon Abeyaratne gave an excellent presentation to a Caltech working group on education methods a few years back that covers some ideas: http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~ihc...

However, systematically, there is no incentives system set up to promote such a spread.