Our Schools, Cut Off From the Web

By LUIS A. UBIÑAS

ON June 6, at a middle school in Mooresville, N.C., President Obama set a goal of high-speed Internet in nearly every public school in America in five years. It was a bold and needed pronouncement — except that in 1996 President Clinton said virtually the same thing, callingfor libraries and classrooms to be “hooked up to the Information Superhighway by the year 2000.”

Many people reading this article are probably doing so on a smartphone, tablet or computer. They might not know that half of Americansdon’t own a smartphone, one-third lack a broadband connection and one-fifth don’t use the Web at all.

Since 2007, when I was named president of the Ford Foundation, we’ve given $44.5 million to dozens of organizations — like Harvard’sBerkman Center for Internet and Society, the Mozilla Foundation and the Media and Democracy Coalition — to make the Internet more accessible, affordable and mindful of privacy.

But as I prepare to step down in September, I must acknowledge that there has been little real progress on this issue. Like any effort to develop our national infrastructure, success demands more than the dedication of the nonprofit sector alone.

The factors that will drive our national future — educational achievement, a healthy population, broad political participation and economic opportunity for all — depend in significant ways on how we structure and manage our spreading digital frontier. About 19 million Americansstill lack access to high-speed broadband; many more can’t afford it.

Virtually all of America’s schools are connected to the Internet today. But that success is a lot like trumpeting, a century ago, that virtually every town in the country was reachable by road. Then, as now, the question is quality. Children who go to school in poor neighborhoods are connected to the Web at speeds so slow as to render most educational Web sites unusable. The exploding world of free online courses from great academies is closed to those who lack a digital pathway.

In 1996, when Mr. Clinton predicted that the Internet would revolutionize education, the future seemed full of possibility. TheTelecommunications Act that year established E-Rate, which subsidizes Internet connections for schools and libraries. The program, capped at $2.25 billion a year, is inadequate — many schools are connected but lack classroom connections, essential hardware and funds for maintenance. Only 63 percent of 150,000 eligible schools were participating as of 2009; some fear bureaucratic hassle or can’t afford the required matching funds. Eighty percent of schools financed by E-Rate report that their broadband connections fall short of their needs.

Since the mid-1990s, a generation of American children has passed through our schools with substandard access to the online world. This is how an information underclass begins to take root — a disturbing contribution to our era of inequality, when jobs and economic opportunity flow to those with the best-honed digital skills.

Mr. Obama was right to call attention to this problem. A good first step in addressing it would be to overhaul E-Rate to make sure it gets the Web into every classroom and library, not just a school, either through cable or Wi-Fi, and with sufficient financing for upkeep. Second, a subset of teachers and librarians need to be trained as champions of digital education. Without such advocates, the pedagogical impact of broadband won’t be fully realized. Third, any conversation on national infrastructure must put broadband as a priority alongside aviation, bridges, energy, highways, ports, rail and water.

Our future depends on the ability of every American to participate fully in our digital economy and democracy. As Franklin D. Rooseveltsaid, “We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.”