No more gut-based strategies: Using evidence to solve the digital divide

The key missing component of nearly every proposal to solve the connectivity problem is evidence — evidence suggesting the ideas are likely to work and ways to use evidence in the future to evaluate whether they did work. Otherwise, we are likely throwing money away. Understanding what works and what doesn’t requires data collection and research now and in the future. It doesn’t have to be this way. The pandemic did not only lay bare the implications of the digital divide, it also created a laboratory for studying how best to bridge the divide. The most immediate problem was how to help kids without home broadband attend distance learning classes. Schools had no time to formally study different options — it was a race to find anything that might help. As a result, schools incidentally ran thousands of concurrent experiments around the country. We should be learning from those experiences. Unfortunately, to our knowledge, nobody systematically collected that data. In other words, while people have busily promoted their pet projects and ideas, nobody stepped back to study the vast amount of information being created by organizations that were trying to solve that very problem. There still is time to look at these experiments and learn from them, but it’s running out.