Celebrating Ten Years of the E-Rate

February 26, 2007

Secretary Margaret Spellings
U. S. Department of Education

Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez
U/S. Department of Commerce

Chairman Kevin Martin
Federal Communications Commission

Dear Secretaries Spellings and Gutierrez, and Chairman Martin:

This week, many people -- Members of Congress, education technology leaders, corporate executives, administration officials and senior staff, state and local educational/library representatives, and national and state association representatives -- will be celebrating a decade of technological progress for public and private schools and public libraries, progress made possible by provisions in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that, when implemented, became to be known as the E-Rate.

The Benton Foundation has conducted multiple research projects on the E-Rate, in partnership with the Joyce Foundation. In February 2000, in collaboration with the Center for Children and Technology, Benton released The E-Rate in America: A Tale of Four Cities. This was one of the first studies of the impact of the then-new federal program, tracing the ideas and political battles that led to its establishment and recounting the practical issues confronting school districts as they sought to benefit from E-Rate resources. The second phase of our E-Rate work culminated in the 2002 release of Great Expectations: Leveraging America’s Investment in Educational Technology. This report continued our investigation into the new program and developed new tools to assist teachers, administrators and policymakers. For the full reports, see the EdTech section at http://www.benton.org/index.php?q=publibrary.

As part of the celebration of the E-Rate’s impact, the Benton Foundation is today releasing two new research papers that highlight the benefits derived from it.

In What Have We Learned From the E-Rate?: An Assessment of E-Rate Performance, Heather E. Hudson explains how the Telecommunications Act of 1996 took an important first step in linking universal service and broadband access. The Act created the E-Rate program as part of the universal service fund to make broadband universally available in every school, classroom, library, and rural health care center in America. The E-Rate has been an enormous success in improving broadband access for libraries and schools. In 1996, only 28 percent of public library systems offered public Internet access. Today, thanks to increased resources and the E-Rate, nearly all library buildings offer public access computing, and 14 million Americans regularly use these computers at no fee. Further, only three percent of instructional classrooms were wired in 1994. As of 2003, 93% of instructional classrooms are wired. Between 1998 (when the E-Rate launched) and 2003, statistics show that classroom Internet access disparities between rural, urban, and suburban schools and high and low-poverty districts have been dramatically reduced.

In When Public Libraries are the Sole Gateway for Those Without Access: Assessing the Performance of Public Libraries Receiving E-Rate Subsidies, Nancy Kranich finds that thanks to the USF’s E-Rate program and other investments, 99% of public libraries are now wired—many with broadband and wireless services—and offer free public access to the Internet. Libraries are now the number one point of access for the public outside the home, school, and work, leveling the playing field for those left behind in the digital age. But the success of the E-Rate program goes well beyond Internet access – it now is helping provide a communication outlet of last resort in a crisis. Both 9/11 and Katrina demonstrated the power of public access broadband in libraries for providing alternative communication channels. Continuing the success of the E-Rate and expanding the goals of universal service to broadband could similarly have broad and unmistakable impacts well beyond just increasing Internet access rates.

But as we mark the success of the E-Rate this week, we also note, with regret, the untimely demise of additional programs that helped make the E-Rate so effective. For ten years, from 1994 to 2004, the Technology Opportunities Program – TOP – supported demonstrations of new telecommunications and information technologies to provide education, health care, or public information in the public and non-profit sectors. We once again need to be supporting innovative applications for harnessing new technologies to advance critical public interest goals.

Community Technology Centers (CTCs) around the country provide low-income, minority, and other disenfranchised individuals free or low-cost public access to technology tools and services, including trainings that may enhance employment opportunities. Federally funded research has demonstrated CTCs to be an effective community-based model, and Congress, in the past, has supported CTCs. However, the elimination of federal support for CTCs has put their work in jeopardy.

These and other cuts signal a dramatic decline in government support for innovative uses of technology to connect communities and opportunities for residents of low-income communities to learn and utilize computer-related skills. As we celebrate the E-Rate’s success this week, let’s not lose sight of additional steps we can take to realize our commitment to ubiquitous, affordable access to the most important technologies of the era.

Sincerely,
Charles Benton

(see .pdf version of this letter at http://www.benton.org/benton_files/tenyears.pdf)