Digital Divide

A growing number of school districts across the country, spurred in part by the coronavirus pandemic, are going into the cell tower business. Many school districts have tried for years to provide internet service to needy families with mixed success.

Lack of student connectivity at home may seem like a recent problem borne of the digital age. But it has historical antecedents in the movement to ensure all students have access to textbooks that they can use both in school and at home. It should, therefore, be viewed as part of a broader dialogue about what is required for an adequate and equitable education.

As incoming Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, I’m making the case that broadband needs to be at the center of any infrastructure or relief package Congress passes in 2021. It is not dreaming too big to demand, right now: Every community should be connected to the twenty-first century shipping lane and communications pipeline—the Internet.

Senators Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) introduced bipartisan legislation to provide E-Rate Support for School Bus Wi-Fi to help close the homework gap while students travel on their daily school bus routes.

The Biden Administration’s goals of restoring a functional federal government, driving economic recovery, and “building back better” lend themselves to a new strategy for universalizing broadband, with a three-pronged approach to directly address each of the barriers I have described that have stalled universal access. First, any significant plan for investing in infrastructure must include sufficient funding in the form of grants and loans for both initial capital investment and ongoing operations and maintenance of universal, future-proofed broadband networks. Second, the Administration s

After buying more than 4.5 million computers and hotspots for students over the last several months, Texas education officials have a new goal: making free at-home internet available to every public school student beyond the pandemic. The ambitious target, laid out in interviews and statements by education leaders, suggests Texas plans to ride momentum building across the nation to close the so-called digital divide. The issue has come into stark view as many students shifted to online-only classes when the novel coronavirus began sweeping the country last March.

Universal broadband is the 21^st century equivalent of electrification, foundational to equity and economic prosperity in urban and rural communities alike.

The latest COVID-19 relief package includes over $7 billion to expand E-rate to better tackle students’ at-home internet needs. But with the dollars doled out so far into the crisis and the end of the school year fast approaching, expectations for how the additional funding will be spent have shifted among school officials and advocates from getting quick fixes, like mobile hotspots, to more long-term projects that will ensure that schools can sustain the progress they’ve made to become more digital-learning friendly.

Too many young people around the world are excluded from accessing the web, and getting them online should be a priority for the post-Covid era, Tim Berners-Lee has said. In a letter published to mark the 32nd birthday of the web, its founder says the opportunity “to reimagine our world and create something better” in the aftermath of Covid-19 must be channeled to getting internet access to the third of people aged between 15 and 24 who are offline. “The influence of young people is felt across their communities and online networks,” Berners-Lee writes.

The New Jersey Department of Education announced that the state has entirely closed its digital divide among students, connecting every K-12 public school student with the devices and broadband necessary to participate in digital classrooms. A survey of New Jersey school districts conducted by the state’s education department at the onset of the pandemic revealed that more than 100,000 students in the state could not access the internet at home and that school districts would need more than 150,000 additional devices to serve their students.