Sean Cavanagh

One of the main fears that school officials have about curtailing “net neutrality” is that internet service companies will have new powers to throttle or block the flow of online content that serves as academic lifeblood for many districts. But gauging whether those worries are justified or overblown requires a lot of speculation about industry behavior, and how it would apply to schools. Chris Lewis, a vice president of the advocacy group Public Knowledge, said dire scenarios envisioned by some school officials are not unrealistic.

Backers of a new plan to upend “net neutrality” policies tout the proposal as a free market approach to internet oversight—one that will encourage an abundance of web content delivery, innovation, and investment, with no more government regulation than is necessary. But some school officials and education organizations are deeply skeptical that the plan will protect educators’ access to online sources, or nurture innovation by K-12 entrepreneurs.  In K-12 circles, two of the biggest worries about Pai’s proposal boil down to the following:

The Federal Communications Commission’s recent makeover of the E-rate program is billed as a step toward transforming the fund from one focused on supporting 1990s-era telecommunication tools to one that accommodates 21st-century technologies.

Now, school officials are trying to gauge what the new policies will mean for teachers, students, and their districts’ bottom lines. If the order works as planned, the application process for funding will become smoother, and the prices schools and libraries pay for services will become more transparent.

like the 16,000-student Red Clay Consolidated School District, in Delaware, are sifting through the order and evaluating where their E-rate funding will rise and fall as a result of FCC’s change of policy.

As some of its competitors have been battered over their policies for protecting student data, Microsoft has sought to make sure that the issue -- and what it regards as its strong record on privacy -- remain firmly in the public eye.

But as the company moves aggressively to position itself as a protector of student-data privacy, some say it also runs the risk of a backlash if it doesn't back up its talk with the kind of vigilance the technology giant promises to deliver.

[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.

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.