Education technology

With great drama, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 became law on December 27, 2021. The $2.3 trillion COVID relief and government spending bill extended unemployment benefits and ensured the government can keep running. The $900 billion COVID relief provision includes over $7 billion to help improve connectivity in the U.S.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration's Minority Broadband Initiative (MBI), in partnership with the United States Distance Learning Association and the Department of Education’s Office of Postsecondary Education, recently held a teleconference(link is external) to brief Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) on new Department of Education distan

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.

Senators Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), both members of the Senate Commerce Committee, introduced the Every Child Connected Act—legislation that aims to reduce the digital divide between students with and without internet access, known as the Homework Gap. Specifically, the legislation accomplishes this goal by targeting available funding sources from Federal Trade Commission data privacy violations to provide vital connectivity to American students at home. The Every Child Connected Act would: 

The state of Connecticut is giving every student in grades K-12 a laptop and paying for their internet access. Recently, the state announced that it had achieved near-universal access for both device distribution and connectivity—a significant achievement in a state where 40 percent of households in some cities lack home access, according to census data. The program, known as the 

The pandemic has made getting computers and internet connections to households with school-age children a priority. The “homework gap” is sizable. Before the pandemic, some 16.9 million children under the age of 18 lived in households without wireline internet service and 7.3 million live in homes without a desktop, laptop, or tablet computer. What was a homework gap is now a learning gap. Many states and localities have responded.

A Q&A with Johannes Bauer, director of the James H. and Mary B. Quello Center for Media and Information Policy at Michigan State University, about how broadband access is affecting K-12 education. 

Q. Did you find that the lack of high-speed internet has an impact beyond getting homework done?

To understand and quantify the pattern and magnitude of the pandemic’s effect on young students, this research brief examines the digital divide in virtual learning by analyzing survey data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The major findings include:

Colorado state lawmakers passed a bill providing $20 million in grants for districts to broaden internet access to students at a time the internet has become the main mode of learning across much of the state and country. But the dollars, part of a state stimulus package at the center of a special legislative session this week, won’t ensure every young Coloradan has a reliable internet connection. The investment is widely viewed — by lawmakers, educators and education advocates — as a short-term fix.

As the pandemic forces students out of school, broadband deployment programs aren't going to move fast enough to help families in immediate need of better internet access. But Democrats at the Federal Communications Commission say the incoming Biden administration could put a dent in that digital divide with one fast policy change.