Education Week

One of the major challenges ahead for educational technology companies centers around this question: Once schools buy the hardware and install the broadband, will the money districts and states are investing in educational technology to prepare for the common core simply fade away, or will it shift to new priorities?

Several market analysts, ed-tech company officials, and education leaders say they do not expect to see the money disappear, but they instead expect a shift in the use of that money that places an emphasis on the impact of different products.

[Commentary] The multibillion-dollar market for educational technology is in one sense being shaped from the top down -- through major policies and economic forces influencing spending across states and school districts.

But it's also being fueled from the ground up -- by a belief among school leaders and entrepreneurs, that digital tools will give schools the power to customize learning to meet individual students' needs. Researchers and industry groups studying the market say they now see a growing demand for ed-tech products, an uptick that has followed a prolonged period of lean budgets at the state and local levels.

An estimated $3.2 billion in new funds are needed to realize President Barack Obama's goal of providing all students with high-speed wireless Internet connections inside their schools and libraries by 2018, concludes a new analysis by two prominent education-technology organizations.

That staggering sum represents a needed investment above and beyond the $2.4 billion currently directed to schools and libraries each year as part of the federal E-rate program. It does not include the additional billions needed to provide schools and libraries with broadband connections to the outside world, nor does it account for the estimated $1.6 billion annually it would take to maintain new in-school wireless networks once they are built.

The new projections come from the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) and EducationSuperHighway. They jointly submitted a first-of-its-kind analysis to the Federal Communications Commission, which is currently overhauling the E-rate, designed to subsidize schools' and libraries' telecommunications costs with fees raised from telecommunications companies.

Baltimore and Boston are cities with their own distinct economic identities, but more recently they’ve shared an economic-development strategy: Both have organizations working aggressively to establish their metro regions as hubs for educational technology companies and startups.

The efforts in Baltimore are being led by an educational technology advisory group focused on building support in the city and across Maryland. In Boston, a nonprofit that began by creating a networking group across the city has now launched an “accelerator” program designed to help young ed-tech businesses succeed.

Education advocates worry that schools could find themselves in the slow lanes of Internet delivery if proposed "net neutrality" rules posted by the Federal Communications Commission are adopted as written.

The new rules would leave an opening for broadband Internet providers like Verizon Communications, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable, to give preferential treatment to content providers that pay for the privilege of faster delivery of their content -- like streaming movies -- to customers.

While potential changes to net neutrality agitated many of those who closely monitor Internet policy, the issue is not well-understood within K-12 circles, despite its potentially broad impact in education, Douglas A. Levin, executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association. "Ultimately for educators, the access to high-capacity broadband is as important in schools today as access to electricity, plumbing, air conditioning, and heating," he said.

For the second year in a row, a handful of states experienced significant disruptions in online testing, creating such a high level of distrust with the technology-based process that some districts chose to revert to paper-and-pencil tests in an effort to avoid problems.

Florida, Kansas, and Oklahoma all suspended online testing at some point during testing windows in April because of computer glitches that led to slow load times or kicked students out of the assessment systems. Indiana districts reported problems during the week of April 21, as they did practice testing, but, as of mid-week last week, officials from the state's department of education reported that only one district was beset by significant glitches.

The fallout from the disruptions comes as many states are moving toward online testing -- some prompted by the expectation that assessments tied to the Common Core State Standards be given online by 2014-15. But publicity surrounding the breakdowns is creating a wariness about testing technology and its ability to operate successfully.

Tension -- between digital reading's tendency to foster increased engagement, but discourage deeper comprehension -- is presenting a massive new challenge for schools, said Andrew Dillon, the dean of the school of information at the University of Texas at Austin.

"There's been this huge push from tech companies to get their stuff into classrooms, but that's purely a commercial venture," Dillon said. "There are real consequences for the types of serious reading people can do in those [digital] environments."

Researchers have documented students' struggles with comprehension when reading Internet-based texts on computers, although the literature on how reading e-books on computers is inconclusive. And while similar research on mobile devices is just emerging, there are worrisome signs.

A study in 2013 by Heather R and Jordan T Schugar, a wife-and-husband research team at Westchester University of Pennsylvania, found that a small sample of students comprehended traditional books at "a much higher level" than they comprehended the same material when read on an iPad.

A 2012 study by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, a New York City-based research organization for children's digital media, found that 3- to 6-year-old children who "co-read" high-tech e-books with their parents "recalled significantly fewer narrative details than children who read the print version of the same story."

As a result, some observers fear that mobile devices, especially digital tablets as they are now being used in the classroom, are not supporting the kinds of extended, rich interactions with text called for in the Common Core State Standards. "People think of technology as the solution, but it's often the cause of the problem," Dillon said. "It's not the end of reading, but it is the diminution or simplification of reading."

Questions arose about whether schools will have to stand in line for acceptable speeds of Internet access under proposed new rules floated by the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

FCC commissioners received the rules, in advance of a May 15 vote. As written, the proposed rules would impact "net neutrality," which refers to the open and free flow of content on the Internet, regardless of where it originates.

The new rules would leave an opening for broadband Internet providers like Verizon Communications, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable, to give preferential treatment to content providers that pay for the privilege of higher priority service.

For schools, the issue is problematic. Unless educational services are offered preferential treatment by providers, "schools could find themselves even further challenged to make use of digital learning tools and services," said Douglas Levin, executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association.

The proposed rules could impact ed-tech companies, too. Larger ones might be well-positioned to pay for fast-lane service, while smaller ones and start-ups could find themselves at a competitive disadvantage, said Amina Fazlullah, policy director of the Benton Foundation, a Washington-based organization that works to ensure that media and telecommunications serve the public interest. "Any net neutrality proposal must ensure the same quality access to online educational content as to entertainment and other commercial offerings," Fazlullah wrote. "We need to ensure that the Internet remains a medium for opportunity not just an opportunity for Internet providers to increase profits."

Applications for federal E-rate money show broad gaps between wealthy and poor school systems' access to high-quality technologies, and varying abilities among districts to purchase connectivity at affordable rates, a new analysis reveals.

The research, released by Education SuperHighway, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that advocates for improved school connections, is based on data the organization says it collected and analyzed from more than 1,000 school districts in 45 states, which had collectively made $350 million in requests for E-rate funding. Among Education SuperHighway's findings:

• School districts that are already meeting the ConnectED goals pay on average only one-third the price for broadband as schools that don't meet that standard. That could be because they're buying more broadband, with economies of scale, or because they're in geographic locations where it's cheaper, Marwell said. But it also could be driven by other factors, he said, such as they could have greater resources and competition from providers;
• School districts that already have fiber optic cable connections have nine times the bandwidth, and 75 percent lower costs, per megabit per second, than districts without fiber;
• School districts with access to "competitive options" pay two to three times less for wide-area-network connections compared with those served by "incumbent" telephone and cable companies. Ideally, those incumbents should be challenged for school district business by local utilities, municipal networks, and competitive local exchange carriers, Marwell argues.
• School districts already meeting the ConnectED goals have budgets for accessing the Internet that are, on average, 450 times larger than those that don't meet those goals, and they invest $7.16 per student, compared with just $1.59 for schools falling short of the mark;
• While just 20 percent of all school districts surveyed are meeting the ConnectED goals, the number is lower, 14 percent, among districts with at least three-quarters of students on free or reduced price lunches. By contrast, a much higher portion, 39 percent, of schools with less than 1 percent of free or reduced price lunch students are meeting the ConnectED goals.

Growing public concern about student-data privacy is prompting fresh scrutiny of the ways technology vendors handle children's educational information -- and opening the gates for a flood of new questions and worries from advocates and school officials.

Take prominent education technology players Edmodo, Khan Academy, and Pearson. Each already has access to the information of tens of millions of US schoolchildren.

But a review of each group's privacy policies by two leading experts yielded concerns about the use of tracking and surveillance technologies that allow third parties to gather information on students; questions about the collection, use, and sharing of massive amounts of student "metadata"; and criticism of the growing burden on students and families, who experts maintain are being forced to navigate an ever-shifting maze of dense vendor policies on their own.

The concerns raised extend far beyond the direct serving of advertisements to students, which Joel Reidenberg, a law professor at Fordham University, described as "just one piece of the commercialization of children."