Executive Summary

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed deep inequities in the United States, and the lack of high-speed broadband access has been front-and-center because this public health crisis has required a large share of the population to work and learn from home. Among those most adversely impacted have been America’s students. The pandemic resulted in the near total shutdown of schools last spring, impacting 55.1 million students at 124,000 U.S. public and private schools.¹ Schools shifted to remote learning almost overnight. The prevalence of remote learning continued into the 2020–2021 school year, with only 24 percent of school districts returning to in-person instruction full-time.

The digital divide has left millions of households in the United States without access to the broadband connectivity needed for education, work, and accessing a wide range of essential information and services central to equal opportunity in today’s economy and society. For the millions of students who live in households without broadband internet access, the move to remote learning has created new, extensive barriers to learning. While the “homework gap” was a serious problem long before the COVID-19 pandemic, the necessity of remote learning in 2020 has turned the homework gap into a chasm. For students without high-speed broadband access at home, completing homework, researching for projects and papers, and exploring developing interests all become impossible to undertake. Quality education today requires internet access at home, and students who do not have that access—whether due to the fact it is not affordable or because it is not deployed where they live—are at a distinct disadvantage.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has both the authority and the resources to mitigate the homework gap and yet it has refused to act. The FCC oversees the Universal Service Fund, which spends billions of dollars each year on several programs with the statutory goal of connecting all Americans to advanced communications, including specifically for education. One of these programs, E-Rate, is designed to help schools and libraries build and maintain broadband networks at a discount to further educational needs. E-Rate is a highly successful program that has connected most schools to gigabit-fast internet connections and funded internal Wi-Fi networks to extend broadband to every student and teacher in the school and even around the school’s playing fields and other facilities. The infrastructure is in place to use this program to help school districts and libraries connect students who cannot get online and therefore cannot access education at home. The FCC has the authority to increase E-Rate funding and to grant school districts the flexibility to reprogram funds to extend connectivity to students at home. However, as we explain below, despite petitions from states and education advocates, the FCC has refused to act. The Open Technology Institute (OTI) urges the FCC, as we did in an emergency filing in April 2020, to take action and use the program to provide the immediate relief students need.

Thankfully, hundreds of school districts around the country have not waited for the FCC to grant them more E-Rate funding or flexibility to allocate E-Rate funds to meet this challenge. This report profiles many different examples of school-sponsored broadband networks that have been built and deployed for educational purposes both during the COVID-19 pandemic and in the years prior. In Part II, we profile more than a dozen school districts that have pioneered a range of innovative approaches to connecting students lacking adequate internet access at home. We start with three school districts in Iowa and California that have partnered with their municipality to build out community Wi-Fi networks that connect low-income students directly to the school’s network. The next subsection profiles school districts in Texas, California, and other states that are taking advantage of novel spectrum sharing frameworks, such as the new Citizens Broadband Radio Service in the 3.5 GHz band, to build out private LTE mobile networks that connect students at home, and that are far more financially sustainable longer term than buying subscriptions from mobile cellular providers.

A third subsection describes efforts in Virginia and Colorado to extend the reach of school networks directly to students at home, or to community hotspots closer to their homes, using the free unlicensed spectrum known as “TV white spaces” (TVWS). TVWS refers to the locally-vacant television channels that can be used to transmit internet access over very long distances. Finally, a fourth subsection highlights districts that are outfitting school buses as Wi-Fi hotspots and parking them strategically in neighborhoods where clusters of students lack broadband at home. Some districts are locating internet hotspots in community centers, public housing, or other more permanent locations. Libraries, which are also eligible for E-Rate funding, have also been stepping up by lending out Wi-Fi hotspots and amplifying their Wi-Fi so that students and other patrons can get online even when the building is closed.

All of these innovative efforts provide a potential blueprint for other school districts, for telecommunications companies, and for local governments struggling to both connect students for remote learning and also keep students connected in a sustainable way for the long term. Each community has different needs and circumstances that will point to one solution over the others. What school districts across the country have in common is the need to find effective and financially sustainable ways to extend connectivity to students who lack it and thereby close the nation’s destructive homework gap.

We must also recognize that the digital divide is a far bigger problem, adversely impacting not just students, but their parents, the elderly, and many other lower-income individuals. The FCC and Congress need to strengthen the Lifeline program and improve broadband competition to ensure that broadband access costs and deployments improve. The FCC, in fact, has a congressionally-mandated obligation to ensure high-speed broadband is deployed in a reasonable and timely manner to all Americans.² Clearly, the government is failing to meet this goal. However, as we discuss, there are specific solutions—such as E-Rate—that are specific to education and that we hope can facilitate solutions today and in the future.

Editorial disclosure: This report mentions policy positions of Microsoft and Google, both of which fund work at New America but did not directly support the research or writing of this report. New America is guided by the principles of full transparency, independence, and accessibility in all its activities and partnerships. New America does not engage in research or educational activities directed or influenced in any way by financial supporters. View our full list of donors at www.newamerica.org/our-funding.