The FCC’s Program to Discount Educational Internet Connections Needs an Upgrade

One of the first priorities of 2021 should be to enable schools and libraries to use E-Rate to help students and patrons get online from home. To support these extensions is to uphold the program’s founding principles of universal service and access. So what is the hold up? For one, Congress can barely figure out how to pass its annual appropriations bills. Although there is a chance that E-Rate changes could come in the final push for COVID-19 relief legislation, relying on lawmakers typically means waiting, and waiting, and waiting. To move more quickly, change could come from within the Federal Communications Commission. But even though education groups and digital inclusion organizations have been pleading with the FCC all year to make these changes, the agency hasn’t budged.

Taking steps to modernize E-Rate could and should come in the very first days of the Biden administration. Let’s stop getting stuck in a 1996 model of how schools and libraries operate. Students who are struggling to get online deserve better. FCC policies should recognize and support what learning looks like today, not stifle it.

[Lisa Guernsey is deputy director of education policy and director of the Learning Technologies Project at New America.]