Education technology

The coronavirus has shut down schools across America, and desperate parents are scrambling to ensure their children’s education doesn’t suffer. The US Department of Education could help with some guidance about how schools can move forward on remote teaching. If the feds don’t take the lead, the teachers unions will—to the detriment of students. Not every student has a laptop and Wi-Fi to study online during the shutdowns. In some districts, this inevitably has an adverse effect on poor students or children who don’t speak English as their first language.

Chronic absenteeism is a problem in American education during the best of times, but now, with the vast majority of the nation’s school buildings closed and lessons being conducted remotely, more students than ever are missing class — not logging on, not checking in or not completing assignments. The absence rate appears particularly high in schools with many low-income students, whose access to home computers and internet connections can be spotty.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced a new streamlined process for providing states funding flexibilities to best meet the needs of students and educators during the COVID-19 national emergency.

Mayor London Breed announced a partnership between the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) and national nonprofit organizations EducationSuperHighway and the 1Million Project Foundation to provide connectivity support for thousands of students in San Francisco who lack home internet access, including the deployment of up to 25 WiFi “SuperSpots.” As part of the new Digital Bridge project, the SuperSpots will be installed in locations to serve students from underserved communities who need to participate in distance learning due to COVID-19 and related school closures.

My family has been forced into a social experiment. One of our daughters is in second grade at a private religious school. Her twin sister, who has special needs, attends a public school. Can you guess which one went online immediately? It’s not mainly a problem of resources. The private school went online in two days with Zoom. I’m teaching all my law-school classes online. New York, the country’s biggest school system, is going online.

Sens Ed Markey (D-MA), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Michael Bennet (D-CO), and Brian Schatz (D-HI) led 31 of their colleagues in a letter to House and Senate leadership requesting robust funding for all K-12 students to have adequate home internet connectivity if their schools close due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The Senators expressed their disappointment with the lack of such funding in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act that recently passed Congress, despite their repeated call for resources dedicated to distance learning.

The coronavirus pandemic has caused shortages of life-saving equipment like masks and ventilators — and now, we could be running low on Wi-Fi hotspots, devices that use cellular signals to create local networks. There are probably fewer than half a million hotspots available from the major carriers in the US, and the Asia-based supply chains that could replenish that stock continue to face coronavirus-linked disruptions, said Evan Marwell, CEO of Education Superhighway, a nonprofit that works with schools to increase broadband access. That pales in comparison to the millions of students wit

Corey Shepherd teaches fifth graders in rural Alaska in a school district the size of Indiana. The terrain there is so rural that only airplanes and snowmobiles connect the district’s 11 tiny villages. Shepherd is one of more than 7,000 teachers in her state trying to make the most of teaching her students since the governor closed schools to in-person learning to stop the spread of the coronavirus. One method she isn’t relying on: online learning. “Around half of my students have access to the internet on some device at home,” Shepherd said.

Groups that procure student-friendly hotspots and laptops with built-in internet access say that, as school districts move all classes online, a spike in demand has created a shortage of thousands — if not millions — of devices. LTE-connected laptops and hotspots are two of the most popular ways that school districts can put a plug-and-play internet connection into students' hands, allowing them to complete homework and keep up with lessons without a hardwired, in-home connection. One of the biggest barriers to obtaining the equipment is that it is made in China. Daniel Neal, founder of sch

The historic $2 trillion “economic rescue” bill includes key funding, which New America explains here, for a number of education initiatives ranging from early childhood to post-secondary. What it doesn’t include, noticeably, is a robust response for helping households gain better online access.