Schools/Universities

As a national leader in developing the broadband workforce, the Wireless Infrastructure Association (WIA) is proud to announce it has launched a new Connecting Minority Communities Apprenticeship Consortium (CMCAC) with three HBCUs: Central State University, Tennessee State University, and Virginia State University. Apprenticeships are a proven model for building a diverse and highly skilled workforce to meet the demands of broadband and 5G buildout.

Broadband champions can be the decisive factors in efforts to improve community connectivity. The work of broadband champions has been shaped by the particularities of their broadband contexts: the local political will, the existing providers, the topography, and the wide-ranging motivations and strategies. What they have in common is their dedication, which has proved to be crucial in helping their communities get high-speed broadband.

Two concrete examples of rapidly growing broadband demand are schools and internet service provider (ISP) backhaul. A decade ago, there was a scramble to get gigabit broadband access to schools. Because of the use of the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) E-rate money, a lot of schools across the country got connected to fiber and were able to buy faster broadband. The original goal was to get a gigabit connection to each school, and almost every school in many states met that goal.

Senators Brian Schatz (D-HI), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Chris Murphy (D-CT), and Katie Britt (R-AK) introduced new legislation to keep kids off social media and help protect them from its harmful impacts. The Kids Off Social Media Act updates legislation Schatz introduced last spring and would set a minimum age of 13 to use social media platforms and prevent social media companies from feeding algorithmically-targeted content to users under the age of 17.

This paper studies the impact of the introduction of fiber broadband in North Carolina, through the lens of student achievement. Campbell links granular data on new fiber construction and advertised download speeds with administrative test score data and local labor market data. Exploiting variation in fiber availability at the census block group level, Campbell implements a difference-in-differences design and find modest effects on educational outcomes, roughly equivalent to lowering class sizes by one student.

In October 2023, President Biden issued a landmark Executive Order to ensure that America leads the way in seizing the promise and managing the risks of artificial intelligence (AI). Since then, agencies all across government have taken vital steps to manage AI’s safety and security risks, protect Americans’ privacy, advance equity and civil rights, stand up for consumers and workers, promote innovation and competition, advance American leadership around the world, and more.

Sen Dick Durbin (D-IL) visited Dominican University to discuss the $2.5 million in federal funding the university received through the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) Connecting Minority Communities Pilot Program that has helped enhance information technology capabilities and close the digital divide for students. Sen Durbin visited one of seven classrooms that, thanks to a portion of the grant proceeds, received technological upgrades to support a hybrid of in-person and remote learning.

AI has become a market imperative for leading American businesses. However, current AI knowledge is largely centered around cities. Meanwhile, in rural America, income inequality has never been higher—nor has the digital divide been more deeply felt.

There’s a common complaint among high school students across the country, and it has nothing to do with curfews or allowances: Internet filters are preventing them from doing online research at school. School districts must block obscene or harmful images to qualify for federally-subsidized internet access under the Children’s Internet Protection Act, passed by Congress nearly 25 years ago. But the records, from 16 districts across 11 states, show they go much further. Some of the censorship inhibits students’ ability to do basic research on sites like Wikipedia and Quora.

Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) led his colleagues in filing an amicus brief opposing the Biden administration’s recent decision to expand the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) E-Rate program to fund Wi-Fi on school buses. The Fifth Circuit lawsuit, Molak v.