Education technology advocates have gotten a big boost from President Obama in the past week. In a State of the Union speech which was sprinkled with references to technology and innovation, the President emphasized the importance of connecting schools and libraries to high-speed Internet, a nod to the ongoing E-rate modernization process. And yesterday, he unveiled a new private sector initiative which will provide hardware, software, and technical expertise to schools across the country.
“Last year, I also pledged to connect 99 percent of our students to high-speed broadband over the next four years,” President Obama said at the State of the Union, announcing for the first time that “with the support of the FCC and companies like Apple, Microsoft, Sprint, and Verizon, we've got a down payment to start connecting more than 15,000 schools and 20 million students over the next two years, without adding a dime to the deficit.”
Much of the coverage has focused on the news of a new public-private partnership where seven big tech companies have pledged $750 million in support of the President’s goals. Apple, AT&T, Autodesk, Microsoft, Sprint, and Verizon will contribute a variety of free or discounted hardware, software, and services to students and teachers across the country. But the more fundamental reforms designed to connect schools and libraries to high-speed Internet have been underway at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for months.
Last June, President Obama announced a new initiative called ConnectED which aims to bring next-generation Internet connectivity to 99 percent of American classrooms within the next five years. Echoing calls made by West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller and FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, the president set a lofty goal: a gigabit of capacity for every 1000 students by 2018. To get there, he urged the FCC to modernize an existing Universal Service Fund (USF) program, E-rate, to help schools and libraries pay for more bandwidth.
E-rate is a USF program that has subsidized telecommunications and Internet services to schools and libraries across the country for the past two decades. Since its inception, E-rate dollars have helped connect over 96% of schools and 98% of libraries to the Internet. But the program has become strained in recent years. Funding requests for the 2013-2014 year added up to nearly double the amount of money that is actually available. Meanwhile, almost 80% of schools report that they no longer have sufficient capacity to meet the needs of their students―in fact, according to a 2010 FCC survey, over half of the institutions reported connection speeds that were slower than the average American home. Libraries face similar capacity constraints.
That’s why the FCC issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in July 2013 to gather input on ways that the E-rate program could be modernized to help schools and libraries meet their 21st century needs. Over 1000 constituent groups weighed in on the process during the fall, including New America. President Obama’s comments in the State of the Union came just a few days after new FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler indicated that E-rate reform is one of his priorities for 2014. “I am firmly committed to meeting the goal of connecting 99 percent of America’s students to high-speed broadband within five years,” Wheeler wrote in a blog post on the FCC’s website, adding, “The E-Rate of yesterday – which has focused on providing schools and libraries with basic connectivity – needs to be updated to support today’s Gigabit fiber and Wi-Fi connectivity.” Commissioner Rosenworcel, a long-time champion of the program, reiterated the critical importance of E-rate reform in a speech at the Sesame Workshop’s Joan Ganz Cooney Center in January.
It’s clear that meeting these goals will require significant investment in infrastructure upgrades, and there is a growing consensus that prioritizing fiber technology is necessary to ensure that these networks are future-proof. One of the groups leading this charge is EducationSuperHighway, a non-profit dedicated to bringing high-speed connectivity to K-12 schools across the country. It has recommended that the FCC create a dedicated upgrade fund that schools and libraries can take advantage of in order to pay for expensive up-front infrastructure costs. Last week, EducationSuperHighway organized a group of 40 CEOs in a letter calling for the FCC to prioritize broadband investment in schools. “To ensure that every student has an equal opportunity to participate in the knowledge economy, we must connect our schools to fiber and deploy ubiquitous wireless networks to all of our classrooms,” wrote the heads of American Express, Dell, eBay, Facebook, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo!, and others. Supporting similar fiber investment for libraries is key as well.
And fiber investment is just the first step. Once schools and libraries have the bandwidth they need, they have to be able to spread that connectivity inside and outside of institutional walls. Increasingly, we live in a world where “traditional” classroom education is changing, and learners of all ages have to have the ability to access online tools and resources at any time of day and throughout their communities. That’s why a number of groups have emphasized that E-rate reform also needs to incorporate increased flexibility to allow schools and libraries to share bandwidth in creative ways to help create truly connected communities.
Equity and transparency are also critical to E-rate reform. Early proposals from FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai suggested that funds should be distributed to schools on a per-pupil basis to streamline the program and be more fair. The idea was largely rejected by most members of the E-rate applicant community, however, who stressed that this could actually lead to greater disparities between schools and would not reflect the widely varied cost of Internet service across the country. It’s also important that reforms to the program prioritize libraries too, rather than focus only on meeting the needs of K-12 schools. Underpinning many of the current E-rate challenges is the need for better program data―especially around pricing―that could benefit schools and libraries, policymakers, researchers, and the public at large. More transparency would improve program accountability, and the data could be collected in a way that eases the burden on schools and libraries by getting more information from providers instead (as well as relying on automated technologies).
As the E-rate reform process moves forward, funding continues to be one of the biggest unanswered questions. When President Obama announced the ConnectED initiative he was conspicuously quiet on the subject of how to pay for significant bandwidth upgrades. Many groups have called for more money in the E-rate program, although there were initial concerns that this could come at the expense of other vital USF programs. This week, the FCC announced that it will double its spending on high-speed Internet in schools and libraries by restructuring the current program and eliminating support for a number of outdated services. The $2 billion that the agency has pledged will come from existing E-rate funds, although details about exactly how that will work are still emerging. And the larger process of E-rate modernization, which involves a number of components beyond investment in high-speed Internet service, will continue in the weeks and months to come.
