Ten Things About ACP that Ted Cruz Cares About: #8 ACP and Education

We're sharing ten questions about the Affordable Connectivity Program that  Senate Commerce Committee  Ranking Member Ted Cruz (R-TX) asked New Street Research Policy Advisor and Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow Blair Levin testified after a hearing entitled The Future of Broadband Affordability.

8. Your written testimony states: “Recent data demonstrates that just 32% of fourth graders read at or above a fourth-grade level.” But your citation to nationsreportcard.gov provides data over several decades, all of which show that no more than 40% of fourth graders in public schools in any year were at fourth-grade level.

a. Are there problems with our education system that exist beyond ACP?

I do not consider myself an expert in education but feel comfortable in opining that I am 100% confident that there are problems with our education system that exist beyond ACP.

Further, again acknowledging my limited expertise in education, I feel comfortable opining that there is no single cause for 100% of our problems with our education system.

I am also confident in opining that the lack of broadband in homes of children attending school will make the problems in our educational system worse, not better.  The fact that the problem of reading scores pre-dates ACP does not make it less of a problem.  Nor does it address the question of whether ACP can be helpful in addressing low reading scores, particularly as artificial intelligence develops personalized ways to assist young readers in overcoming specific decoding problems that serve as barriers to their learning to read. 

Again, I would urge Congress to skate where the puck is going, not where it is or where it was in the past.

b. A recent report from the National Library of Medicine examines the harmful effects of too much screen time for children. Do you agree there are harmful effects of too much screen time?

I am also not an expert on the impact of too much screen time for children but based on reading I have done, such as Dr. Haidt’s recent book,¹ I would agree that there is evidence that should cause parents and public policy officials to investigate and adopt appropriate policies.  Indeed, I gave a speech that touched on the subject in February 2023, advocating for a more active role for government to both study, and depending on the outcome of the study, address those concerns.

But I admit to being completely perplexed by the logic of the question in the context of the discussion of the ACP.  The seems to imply that if any kind of screen time can be a problem, we should not seek to use the tools of technology that use screens in ways that improve a child’s education.

Of course, all technologies have negative consequences.  Last year, 40,990 Americans died in car related accidents but that is not an argument for banning cars.²  It is an argument for developing safety guidelines, such as requiring seat belts and having appropriate rules of the road to limit such fatalities.

Certain drugs, that can save and improve lives, can also be used in ways that cause harm.  But that is not an argument for banning medically approved drugs.  It is an argument for developing procedures and safeguards for the distribution of such drugs.

I could cite many similar examples relating to technology but let me focus on one perhaps closer to the point of the hearing and my testimony on ACP.  Recently Florida adopted a law that bans children under 14 in the state from having social media accounts and requiring minors aged 14 and 15 to have parental consent to hold one. Similarly, Utah adopted a law that tries to address the harm by, among other things, requires social media companies to verify users' ages and implement age assurance systems to determine if account holders are minors and to disable certain features on accounts owned by Utah minors, including direct messages, sharing features, autopay, push notifications, and search engine indexing of account profiles. Ohio just enacted legislation that limits the use of cell phones in schools.

My point is not to endorse any specific legislation but to highlight that while these states, to their credit, are taking the concerns about screen time seriously and developing different solutions, they are, at the same time, recognizing that communications technology can play an important role in education.  Indeed, those states spend hundreds of millions on technology related to education, suggesting a balanced approach to addressing both the opportunity and the potential problems screens can present for school children.³

And we should recognize the importance of in-home connectivity for students to be able to do their best in their educational pursuits.⁴ For example, even before the pandemic, numerous surveys and studies demonstrated that students without access to the internet at home were at an educational disadvantage.⁵ A different study using Census Bureau data estimated that individuals with greater access to a computer and the internet at home spent 28 percent more hours learning than those without such access.⁶

In short, I believe the United States is capable of both using technology to improve educational outcomes for school children, while also protecting children from potential harms from the use of technology.  I would hope that we could all agree with those goals and develop policies accordingly.

More in this Series

• Ten Things About ACP that Ted Cruz Cares About—And Ten Answers that Could Help Reshape How We Think About the Program
• #2 The Economic Benefit of ACP to the Health Care System
• #3 Net Cost Savings to Government
• #4 ACP and GDP
• #5 ACP vs Private Low-Income Plans 
• #6 ACP and Telemedicine
• #7 ACP and BEAD
• #8 ACP and Education
• #9 Broadband Adoption Research
• #10 What Companies Care About the Affordable Connectivity Program?

Notes

1. This should not be seen as an endorsement of the book or its conclusion.  I simply cite it as a serious work addressing what I believe is likely to be a set of serious issues.
2. As the NHTSA notes, that number represents a decline over the previous year.  The release goes on to discuss various policies designed to continue the trend toward lowering the number of fatalities. 
3. A more comprehensive answer to concerns about screen time and the relationship between those concerns and the educational potential of technology in the classroom can be found in a letter from The Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband (SHLB) Coalition, the American Library Association (ALA), and the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) to the FCC relating to the E-Rate program. https://assets.noviams.com/novi-file-uploads/shlbc/PDFs_and_Documents/E-...
4. As a Brookings report from 2020 detailed (https://www.brookings.edu/articles/realizing-the-promise-how-can-education-technology-improve-learning-for-all/) educational technology has the potential to positively impact student outcomes, particularly in core reading and numeracy skills.
5. See, e.g., Monica Anderson & Andrew Perrin, PEW RESEARCH CENTER, (Oct. 26, 2018), https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/10/26/nearly-one-in-five-teen... (finding that “17% of teens say they are often or sometimes unable to complete homework assignments because they do not have reliable access to a computer or internet connection”).
6. Kolawole Ogundari, Student access to technology at home and learning hours during COVID-19 in the U.S, Educational Research for Policy and Practice (May 2023), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10176282/pdf/10671_2023_Art....

Blair Levin is the Policy Advisor to New Street Research and a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings Metro​. Prior to joining New Street, Blair served as Chief of Staff to FCC Chairman Reed Hundt (1993-1997), directed the writing of the United States National Broadband Plan (2009-2010), and was a policy analyst for the equity research teams at Legg Mason and Stif Nicolaus. Levin is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School.

The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society is a non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring that all people in the U.S. have access to competitive, High-Performance Broadband regardless of where they live or who they are. We believe communication policy - rooted in the values of access, equity, and diversity - has the power to deliver new opportunities and strengthen communities.

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