The Washington Post published a story about the millions of students who are effectively denied an education during the pandemic because their family can’t afford to pay for access to the Internet.
The Post called the situation “a national crisis.” It is.
The Internet has become as essential as free water and air. Why isn’t it a public utility, regulated by the FCC and free to all?
When you turn on a radio, you get free access to AM and FM stations. Why not free access to the Internet? There may be a good reason, but I haven’t heard it.
Here is the story:
‘A national crisis’: As coronavirus forces many schools online this fall, millions of disconnected students are being left behind
Before the pandemic, it was called “the homework gap,” because of the growing number of teachers who assigned homework that required Internet access. Now, as the pandemic forces many schools to switch to remote learning, disconnected students will miss more than homework. They’ll miss all of school.
For all the talk of Generation Z’s Internet savvy, a stunning number of young people are locked out of virtual classes because they lack high-speed Internet service at home. In 2018, nearly 17 million children lived in homes without high-speed Internet, and more than 7 million did not have computers at home, according to a report prepared by a coalition of civil rights and education groups that analyzed census data for that year.
The issue affects a disproportionately high percentage of Black, Latino and Native American households — with nearly one-third of students lacking high-speed Internet at home. Students in Southern states and in rural communities also were particularly overrepresented. In Mississippi and Arkansas, about 40 percent of students lacked high-speed Internet.
After the closures prompted by the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, school systems rushed to buy and distribute laptops and WiFi hot spots to students, and service providers offered discounts to low-income families, efforts that made a dent in the numbers.
Education advocates say Congress could deliver an easy fix as part of a coronavirus relief package by expanding an existing program that helps schools and libraries get Internet service. But those hopes collapsed alongside talks between Congress and the White House on a new relief package. With talks deadlocked, President Trump issued an executive order for coronavirus relief. It provides nothing for K-12 public schools. The consequences of the gap between those who have access to virtual learning and those who do not could be felt for years to come.
“It’s dire,” said Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.), who has pushed to increase funding that subsidizes the cost of Internet service for schools and libraries. Her district contains parts of rural Virginia that are not served by Internet service providers. “We are generationally committing to significant divides in our communities over what kind of education our children are getting.”
Internet access is so central to children’s education that allowing students to go without it is like sending them to classrooms without textbooks, said Jordana Barton, who studies the digital divide in Texas as a community development adviser for the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. So many students being without Internet service is “a travesty,” she said.
“Before the pandemic, I thought that the homework gap was so serious that Internet should be provided by the schools,” she said.
America is about to start online learning, Round 2. For millions of students, it won’t be any better.
Educators have long seen access to high-speed Internet as essential — not optional — for students. Now, the pandemic has forced many schools to start classes remotely, and the problem has taken on new urgency. Because the Internet is essential to gaining access to virtual instruction, a failure to provide the service to students is akin to barring them from school altogether.
“It’s going back to the old days where we blocked people from going to schools to be able to learn to read,” said Pedro Martinez, the superintendent of the San Antonio Independent School District in Texas. More than half of families in Martinez’s district do not have high-speed Internet service at home. “It’s like us saying, ‘You can’t come into class. You can’t come to school.’ ”
Maryland resident Haydee Berdejo, 18, does not have high-speed Internet at home in Baltimore and can get online only with a smartphone. When her magnet high school, Baltimore City College, shut down in mid-March, she spent her school days hunched over the phone, where she had difficulty hearing her teachers.
Berdejo, who is from Mexico and still learning English, said the setup made bridging the language gap even more difficult. At times, the screen was fuzzy. And though her classes are mostly taught in English, with the schools closed, she no longer has access to a translator.
She said she is anxious about the coming school year because she has had little opportunity to practice English. “I’m worried I won’t be able to participate in class or answer a question from the teacher, because I won’t know what they’re saying to me,” she said in Spanish.
Even as many students start school without high-speed Internet service at home, Congress and the Federal Communications Commission have done little to help school systems meet that need. Many have given up hope that help is coming and have instead appealed to charities, philanthropists and the Internet service providers themselves, hoping for donations or discounts. Susan Enfield, the superintendent of the Highline Public Schools in Washington state, set up a program to allow more-affluent families to “sponsor” low-income households by paying their Internet bills.
Though some service providers offer discounts to low-income families, service is still out of reach for those who have poor credit or unpaid bills. And even the discounted rate can be too much — especially for families struggling with job losses.
In Baltimore, the school system helped set up 7,000 families with Internet Essentials, a program that provides low-cost Internet service to qualifying households. The first two months of the program were free. But last month, the school system realized that if it didn’t pay the $650,000 bill, many of those families would lose service.
“I was not going to stand by and let 14,000 students not be able to log on because of a bill we knew needed to be paid,” said Baltimore City Public Schools CEO Sonja Santelises. “It’s yet one more thing that, in serving children and families, schools are being asked to do.”
The lack of a national strategy has left superintendents to devise solutions on their own. And that means whether students get connected often depends on the charisma of a superintendent and the generosity of the surrounding community, Santelises said.
“It is the leaders who are trying to do deals, who are trying to negotiate, trying to leverage money here, leverage money there,” Santelises said. “If we are relying on the individual negotiation capacity of Sonja Santelises or any other sitting superintendent to make sure families have WiFi, that is problematic, and it is a split, and it is symptomatic of a much larger issue.”
A long-standing program run by the Federal Communications Commission that subsidizes Internet service for schools and libraries is of little help to students during the pandemic. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai told schools they can use the funding only for Internet service at their campuses — even when schools have been shut down. Pai has said that the law does not allow the money to be used for providing domestic Internet service and that he does not have the authority to do otherwise.
FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, the sole Democrat on the panel, disagrees — as do congressional Democrats and school leaders across the country. She accused the commission of failing to act to address what she called “a national crisis.”
“The FCC is sticking its head in the sand or looking the other way and doing everything it can to ignore this,” Rosenworcel said. “This is something we can fix — and we should.”
Schools and students have been left to find solutions on their own. The parking lots of schools, libraries and fast-food restaurants that offer free WiFi have become de facto classrooms for many students. Other school systems equipped buses with WiFi hot spots and parked them in underserved neighborhoods. In some school systems, such as Baltimore, officials just paid the bills of hundreds of families out of their own budgets to keep the households online.
But none of the improvised solutions are sustainable or scalable, and they often rely on the ability of school officials to court philanthropists and negotiate with Internet service providers.
Cleveland public schools CEO Eric Gordon said he hopes the pandemic will force lawmakers to rethink how they view the Internet. He said two-thirds of households in his district can connect to the Internet only by cellphone, which is inadequate for virtual classes.
“It’s just time we recognize that the Internet has become a utility in the same way electricity became a public utility,” Gordon said.
Bryan Akins, the principal of Keota High School in rural southeast Oklahoma, said many of his families do not have a reliable cellular signal — let alone high-speed Internet. Companies see little incentive to lay broadband lines in places where they will not get many customers, or they pass the expense to customers, charging more to those who live in far-flung communities. The school’s switch-over to remote learning in the spring posed “a big problem,” Akins said.
“My teachers can teach virtually, but my students can’t access it virtually,” Akins said. Instead, staffers in the high-poverty district delivered homework along with weekly grocery packages. “Now you’re relying on the parent to help teach, or the student to teach themselves.”
But although connectivity challenges are often viewed as a rural problem, many students in urban districts also lack high-speed Internet service at home. In some cases, this is because they live in neighborhoods that — like many rural communities — do not have the infrastructure. In many others, the barrier is the expense, even though many service providers offer low-income families steeply discounted Internet service. Families that are facing financial turmoil in the recession may opt to drop the Internet.
Jaclyn Trapp, who is to start 10th grade at MC2STEM High School in Cleveland, shares a Chromebook with a little brother and with three stepsiblings who visit on weekends. When the pandemic hit, her mother and stepfather, both interior house painters, took a huge hit financially as work dried up. So they canceled their home Internet service, which had cost around $60 a month.
Jaclyn began using her phone as a hot spot — but soon she was out of data. Finally, the family struck a deal with an upstairs neighbor who agreed to allow the family to use his WiFi if they split the bill. But the signal, which has to travel to their downstairs apartment, is slow and unreliable.
“Without the Internet and not going to school, it’s really hard to do schoolwork,” Jaclyn said.
Moriah Balingit is an education reporter for The Washington Post, where she has worked since 2014. She previously covered crime, city hall and crime in city hall at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
We don’t have free water either.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 should never have passed. When there is only one phone company, only one internet service provider, prices are kept low and quality is kept high. Service is more broadly distributed. Privatization (really called outsourcing) of telecom, education, water, electricity, etc causes costs to go up as high as the private providers can get people to pay, and causes service to be as low quality as possible as companies cut costs to benefit shareholders instead of stakeholders.
In the case of water, think Flint, Michigan. It was never free, but at least it was clean.
It was clean until Republican Governor Rick Snyder appointed an emergency manager and told him to cut costs in Flint.
For that matter, what utilities are free? Not electric, gas, phone or water. Are you making the argument that all of those should be free?
That a good idea. But if they are not free, they should be regulated.
Absolutely, positively correct!
My wife and I were just talking about this fact moments ago.
And, again, it’s not just students with no internet or no computer.
It’s those families with crappy internet where kids can’t watch “Zoom” meetings or live streaming of classes or four kids are struggling with one computer and on and on and on……
It’s scandalous.
And, red county, rural voters especially…..YOUR counties so often voted for this mess in 2016 and many of you just keep supporting Trump and the G.O.P. You might as well go out with a shotgun and shoot yourself in the feet. Worse, so,so worse, you’re shooting your kids in the feet.
Why didn’t Trump bring high speed, reliable internet to everyone?
Look at your small towns….look at family farms….the small businesses going under…
THIS is the so-called “great” America you voted for.
It’s Orwellian….it’s the exact opposite of great.
For God’s sake….for your children’s sake…..demand something better…..
Huh, I wasn’t aware that the internet was invented in 2016. I would have thought someone before Trump could have brought high speed, reliable internet to everyone, but I guess I’m wrong.
Again, again, gas, water, electric and phone have been around a lot longer than that. Why hasn’t any president brought those to everyone for free?
Translation: Don’t blame Trump.
Trump was going to be the savior of rural America, or at least that’s what he claimed.
Right!
And, we’re not looking for free utilities…just modern, affordable, equitable service..for our families.
My understanding is that “rural free mail delivery”, which finally became the law at the end of the 1800s, was not about free mail. It was about equity. And, as a side result, it helped the economy of the entire nation.
Of course, who would’ve ever thought the U.S. Postal Service would be unraveling right before our eyes.
Let me try to link again to the US Postal Service history of rural free delivery.
I didn’t know that you were such a Socialist!
I agree that ‘utilities’ essentially invented by our tax money should be free, and largely paid for by a progressive tax platform.
The ‘internet’ was invented as ‘Arpanet’, a taxpayer funded military project. It adopted ‘TCP/IP’ as a protocol, and I remember ‘logging in’ from my farm in the mid 1980’s. You would leave a message on a central computer and wait (almost nobody was using the system, and there wasn’t much to talk about). It was pretty boring, and only people like short wave radio geeks seemed to be ‘online’.
However, as more people discovered the ‘internet’ it became more interesting.
My point, however, is that it was invented, developed and run as a government program (paid for by your tax dollars), but was allowed to be captured by business tycoons who became billionaires using something you paid to invent. Kinda like the way the drug industry operates. Why doesn’t the ‘government’ patent it’s inventions like private industry?
Once upon a time, a man named Jonas Salk invented a polio vaccine.
When he was asked about how much he would charge, he responded, “It’s free to the world!”. Salk worked because he wanted to help people, and he felt the government support (grants) he got made it immoral to try to sell his findings. That’s the way science used to work. It’s sort of a Socialist ethic, you see.
It’s ideological. They’re waiting for the private market to solve it. To treat it like a public utility means the market failed and as we know markets can’t fail, they can only be failed by people. These students in Cleveland have not lived up to market dogma. They have to try harder.
Good Luck. The ‘private market’ never invents anything by itself (other than laws allowing them to siphon even more into the pockets of the wealthy).
What if instead of spending billions on elaborate teacher measurement schemes dreamed up at insanely expensive Ivy League colleges we had taken that public funding and put it into infrastucture, like a national internet utility program?
Better or worse for low income students?
Internet service in this country is very uneven particularly in rural areas. Many poor families do not have access to computers, and some school systems do not provide them. Virtual instruction does not work well with certain classified students. In some cases parents are suing school districts that have not provided adapted instruction for their children.
NPR reported on a parent survey on online instruction. Access to the internet directly correlates to family income. Also, all parents regardless of income do not give virtual learning high marks. Parents seem to understand that virtual learning is a poor substitute for in person instruction.https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/05/27/862705225/survey-shows-big-remote-learning-gaps-for-low-income-and-special-needs-children
Heck, my son doesn’t have power and when landlines were still in he had to go down the road a ways to a neighbor who had a power pole. His phone was on the pole. His internet is satellite and sketchy. We often Skype in “Monet” if you know what I mean. His cell phone doesn’t work from home, so he calls on the road. Over the internet works pretty well. If you want everyone to be covered than it will have to be subsidized by tax dollars because no private company wants to cover “the last mile.” Just look at phones nowadays. Every few years you have to “upgrade” when they stop supporting the old one. I never had to upgrade my old rotary phones (and actually still have one!).
“The Washington Post published a story about the millions of students who are effectively denied an education during the pandemic because their family can’t afford to pay for access to the Internet.”
One problem comes from a Trump supporter who said, “I don’t read anything from WaPo.”
It’s one important story that won’t be believed because it comes from a ‘fake’ media. Want to bet that Fox cares anything about poor students or families with no WiFi and no ability to pay for internet services or a laptop?
The poor don’t deserve anything because if they worked hard, they would ALL be millionaires. BS never stops flying.
RE: WaPo vs Fox fans. It may be true that only outlets rw’ers consider “librul” are calling for internet to become a gov-regulated utility, fed-funded natl infrastructure projects etc. But the issue– that too many can’t access it– is getting lots of media attention right now, w/plenty of reporting on who doesn’t, & how different areas are trying to solve, mostly spurred by the need for receiving remote ed. I expect this will ultimately lead to natl discussion/ legislation. But the need is now.
Just like w/every other public issue highlighted by the pandemic, no one is waiting for gridlocked legislators and miserly Reps to deliver solutions. (Even in some utopia w/non-neoliberal Dems in charge, it would take years to formulate & implement natl solutions.) States & municipalities are taking actions– and small entrepreneurs are jumping into the huge opportunity gap left by greedy tech giants. Here’s just one: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/texas-inc/article/houston-startup-rural-internet-access-tv-channels-15476539.php
And Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post could probably pay for it with just the billions by which he has increased his wealth since the start of the pandemic.
George Lucas 2008.
George Lucas testified in front of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet to back the Universal Service Fund. Lucas called on lawmakers to create a free, “third Internet” that would be used only for educational use. Of course, Lucas’ appearance was mocked by several members of the committee.
Pennsylvania Republican Mike Doyle: “The universal service fund needs to be blown up like the Death Star.”
Rep Lee Terry: “Rick Boucher and I are the Luke Skywalkers riding in to save the universal service fund by those who want to destroy it, the Darth Vaders.”
Massachusetts Democrat and subcommittee chairman Edward Markey: “The e-rate became law when Congress enacted it as part of the Telecom Act, and we’ve defended it with political light sabers ever since.”
Too bad Joe Kennedy III is trying to take down Senator Markey in Mass. He is among the best in the Senate, cosponsored the Green New Deal with AOC.
From wikipedia: Since July 2010, Finland has become the first country in the world to make Internet access a legal right. In October 2009, Finland’s Ministry of Transport and Communications committed to ensuring that every person in Finland can access the Internet at a minimum speed of one megabit per second starting July 2010.
Most radio stations are supported by advertising. In that respect, they are not free. This is not different from most newspapers, and many other forms of communication, including Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
Here are some examples of recommended bandwidth sizes for different usage scenarios by a SINGLE user:
Social Media and surfing the web (1– 3 Mbps)
Video conferencing (2 – 4 Mbps)
Online video streaming e.g. via Netflix (3 – 5 Mbps)
Streaming videos in HD (5 – 7 Mbps)
So Finland’s standard get you to the web but not much more.
According to EdSurge, about 28% of school districts had reached the 1 Mbps per student goal in 2018…same as Finland.
BUT, online schools are said to require a minimum of 1.5 Mbps upload and download PER STUDENT. The same can be assumed for kids doing homework online at home. Source: https://www.otelco.com/how-much-internet-speed-do-i-really-need/
We once had ‘free’ radio, NPR. PBS gave you Fred Rogers instead of the Mouseketeers.
The funding was cut, and suddenly it was largely funded by big money (and corporate) ‘underwriters’. The programming on NPR and PBS became more trite and commercial. Sesame Street changed it’s tune.
You now drive on ‘free’ roads. Imagine what will happen when the funding is cut and ‘underwriters’ fill the gap.
Where I live there are two options to pay for access to the Internet.
ONE is AT&T – I burned the bridge to that corrupt puke of a lying, manipulating company years ago (my opinion based on having dealt directly with them through snail mail, e-mail, and phone calls and getting no improvements, but we did get threats that we’d be fined if we left before the contract ended.).
TWO is Comcast.
There is no other choice but those two at this time that I know of. I check about once a year to see if there are more choices and competition for my dollars.
I have what I think is the cheapest plan available with Comcast and that does not include any access for TV programs.
I pay $87.57 a month or $1,050.84 annually, and Comcast keeps sending me crap attempting to entice me to sign up for more options that come with a higher price. I am not interested.
In my small community, the city government decided to go all in on high-speed fiber optic cable a few years ago, 90% of which is underground. Since then we’ve cut the cord from cable and “service providers,” have gotten rid of our land line telephone, and only use a smart tv and change preferences every now and then. Much cheaper, much better. We have great internet connection, municipalities from around the nation and Canada come here to study, we have real Jeffersonian contact with our providers–the few times we have problems, it gets taken care of within hours. This should be the standard for the entire nation. When I think of AT&T and Comcast now, it’s like thinking of buggy whip and celluloid collar makers.
If the BBC (Billionaire Boys Club—ironically, typically techies) bothered to ask teachers, they’d learn quickly that it’s the technology that is consistently a barrier to success. We need more laptops for students at home, hotspots & classroom laptops. It is astounding that the country is again po’d at teachers when we’re trying to solve problems. Listen, BBC!
to ask
Mark Zuckerberg just became a “centibillionaire,” right up there w/Bezos & Gates (The 3 of them the only people in the world worth $100 billion. A local Chicago columnist wrote that Z should “buy a computer for every kid in America who needs one.”–Heidi Stevens,
Chicago Tribune, Tuesday August 11th. (“Congrats on Becoming a Centibillionaire”)
“What do you say, Zuck? The country’s in crisis. Kids are paying the price…here’s your chance to step up & hand kids the tools that can connect them to the world before the world moves on w/o them.”
I’d like that, & I bet you would, too. After all, we contributed to his vast wealth. Greatly.