Education technology

A full 15 to 16 million public school students across the US live in households without adequate internet access or computing devices to facilitate distance learning. Almost 10% of public school teachers (300,000 to 400,000) are also caught in the gap, affecting their ability to run remote classes. The 32-page report, Closing the K–12 Digital Divide in the Age of Distance Learning, fixes a one-year price tag of at least $6 billion and as much as $11 billion to connect all kids at home, and an additional $1 billion to close the divide for teachers.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai says that while the FCC's hands are tied when it comes to applying E-rate schools and libraries funding to remote learning during the pandemic, there are billions of dollars that could already be applied to that purpose Congress has already allocated and the FCC is working on getting educators to spend on education tech. Chairman Pai said he understood the frustration, and had asked Congress to clear away that statutory language impediment in the meantime.

Chicago Connected is a groundbreaking program that will provide free high-speed internet service to approximately 100,000 Chicago Public Schools (CPS) students. This first-of-its-kind program will be one of the largest and longest-term efforts by any city to provide free, high-speed internet over the course of four years to increase internet access for students. According to Census data, an estimated 100,000 students lack access to high-speed internet in Chicago.

A new weekly Household Pulse Survey from the US Census Bureau offers a rich opportunity to quantify the impact of COVID-19 on children’s education during this time. It includes questions about the availability of digital devices and the internet in homes across the US, which allow us to explore the concern that access to distance learning is out of the reach of many of the most vulnerable students. Based on four weeks of data, our findings are bleak:

On March 16, 2020, 16 senators wrote to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai urging the FCC to use its emergency powers during the coronavirus pandemic to temporarily waive relevant E-rate program rules and allow its beneficiaries to utilize universal service funding to provide home wireless service to existing school devices and hotspots for students who lack internet access at home. 

School districts are beginning to craft their strategies for what teaching and learning will look like for the 2020-21 academic year and beyond. Despite widespread frustrations with the downsides of remote teaching and learning, many teachers are seeing how online learning can make it easier to move students in the same class at different paces and provide one-on-one feedback for struggling students, when they’re not all in the same physical space.

In a matter of days, the “homework gap” widened to a full-fledged learning gap, as computers and internet connections soared to the top of the list of required school supplies and districts made hasty plans to roll out virtual learning. What that disparity has revealed about the education inequities in our country, according to Common Sense Media’s CEO Jim Steyer, is “a national disgrace.” “Millions and millions of kids … don’t even have the basic essentials of what they need to be students during this time,” Steyer said.

Staff from the Georgia Department of Education shared a statewide public education update June 15. Two key issues came to the forefront quickly for school districts across the state, said Tiffany Taylor with the Georgia Department of Education. Those were providing students with continued access to school meals and ensuring families have access to internet connectivity and digital devices for distance learning. The state education department surveyed schools at the start of the pandemic to find out how many students would have access devices outside of school.

The pandemic has highlighted the need for county and city governments to provide their workers and K-12 students with internet connections and related technology, especially laptops, experts said during a June 4 CompTIA webinar titled “Stretching the Limits: Broadband Capacity and Availability in a Crisis.” Albemarle County (VA) a largely rural area that is home to the University of Virginia, partnered with its public schools division to provide surplus laptops to social service workers who didn’t have them.