Is ID for kids? Well, in the past 15 years or so, the largest employers have been corporate. 30 years ago, ID started out (with federal funding) with a dual focus on military training and school/post-secondary education, but interestingly the acceptance in both arenas has come very slowly. The early large-scale adopters seem to be industry, first, and home computer owners, second. Post secondary and the military are only now getting around to serious spending. Elementary has been an early adopter, due mostly to Title I, but the universality of the computer seems finally to have made it clear to K-12 that they need to put serious money of their own into TBT, and the funds are forthcoming in many states.
But there still are lots of clueless educators, lest we get our hopes up. Example: I currently have on my desk a multi-million-dollar RFP from an Eastern state. It is a major initiative in response to school-to-work (a movement to build stronger influence of the world of work into schools). The RFP is mostly about hardware and networking. The main software requirement, this state's response to school-to-work, is to put an office suite (e.g., Microsoft Office) on every machine and have kids do their problems with spreadsheets and the like! Curriculum-based software is explicitly excluded from the solicitation!
About a decade ago, when the attack on colleges of education was at its height, I argued that ID departments probably didn't belong in colleges of education; they probably belonged in colleges of business or communications. The reasoning: the colleges of education that I knew all defined their mission in terms of school as we know it all too well. That is, they acted as if their fundamental principle was that learning = teaching = school. Since no IDer I know of could rationally come up with school as we know it as the optimum delivery system for any kind of learning, I viewed ID as fundamentally antithetical to the mission of colleges of education (except in cases where the vision of the College of Education did not correspond to the principle stated above). Sure 'nuff, a number of ID departments didn't survive, and at least a handful did move.
Happily, the landscape is brighter now (I think), and maybe ID departments will become the leaders in the change movement now under way. Or not...