Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
U.S. schools’ inequity seen in year online
$7B from stimulus package aimed at distance learning
When the coronavirus pandemic shut down schools, educators had to figure out how to get kids online. Fast.
In a patchwork approach born of desperation, they scrounged wireless hot spots, struck deals with cable companies and even created networks of their own.
With federal relief money and assistance from state governments and philanthropists, they have helped millions of students get online for distance learning. Still, a year into the pandemic, millions of others remain without internet because of financial hurdles and logistical difficulties.
There will soon be more money for schools to provide internet, as well as programs that aim to make it more affordable. The $1.9 trillion stimulus package that President Joe Biden signed last week contains $7 billion for distance learning. Advocates working to address the digital divide say the funding will be groundbreaking for schools’ efforts to connect students.
In Chicago, philanthropy paid for nearly half the $50 million, four-year Chicago Connected program, which pays for children’s home internet if they qualify for reduced-price lunches. Chicago Public Schools, the country’s third-largest district, is on the hook for $25 million.
About one-fifth of the 242,000 students who are eligible have gotten internet.
Cherelle Bilal said her free Chicago Connected internet service was crucial to helping her four kids attend school, even though they still struggle with staying focused in a virtual classroom. Before, “it was horrible,” she said. Her service was inadequate.
“We would be kicked out of our Zoom calls,” she said. “It just glitched; we couldn’t hear sometimes.”
Well before the pandemic, schools were working to address the challenges presented by the digital divide, which disproportionately affects Black, Hispanic and American Indian students and those in low-income households. The shift to distance learning dramatically raised the stakes.
Common Sense, a nonprofit that advocates for internet access, estimates that of the 15 million schoolchildren who lacked sufficient
internet when the pandemic hit, 2 million to 5 million have been connected. But many programs have end dates.
In Philadelphia, for example, a $17 million program to connect as many as 35,000 students that relies on philanthropists and federal stimulus money will run through summer 2022. Baltimore City Schools is paying for Comcast home internet or a T-Mobile hot spot for low-income students through September.
About two-thirds of newly connected households got hot spots, typically small boxes that generate internet on the go, estimated Evan Marwell, CEO of EducationSuperHighway, a nonprofit focused on getting schools internet. The rest came mostly from deals with cable companies like Comcast. A few districts launched or expanded their own networks.
Schools had to take a lead because the federal government has failed to make internet available and affordable, said Blair Levin, an Obama administration Federal Communications Commission official.
“The schools were so stressed,” Levin said. “It was not easy. It was a big burden.”
STATES HELP OUT
States have also played a large role in connecting students, funneling money to schools or organizing purchases themselves. Connecticut paid for hot spots and devices. Alabama gave families vouchers for internet service. North Dakota identified students without internet access.
Each approach had its drawbacks.
Hot spots don’t work well in homes with multiple students or if cellphone reception is bad. Some school officials and families criticized the cable and wireless companies’ low-cost internet as still too expensive over the long term, or inadequate. Creating networks takes time, money and expertise, and sometimes they were not ready to go in an emergency.
Boulder Valley School District in Colorado started a wireless network with a local internet company three years ago, putting antennas on top of schools and giving nearby low-income students free internet; 6,000 are eligible based on income.
It sped up its rollout because of the pandemic but still serves only 216 students. The district just got a $1 million grant to quicken deployment, said Andrew Moore, the district’s chief information officer.
Before the pandemic, East Side Union High School District in San Jose, Calif., was working on a $10 million community Wi-Fi network with help from the city. It is eventually supposed to serve 300,000 residents.
But the city library cautions that the network’s “indoor connectivity is not guaranteed.” The city is sending families boosters to improve their connection and spent $5 million on roughly 13,000 AT&T hot spots for students for the year.
For schools to provide internet to students at home invites fraud and waste, argued George Ford, economist of the Phoenix Center, a think tank that opposes efforts by cities to make their own broadband networks.
“Public school systems aren’t set up to do that sort of thing,” he said.
But schools are critical for connecting students after the pandemic, said Amina Fazlullah, equity policy director of Common Sense. They can purchase in bulk, driving down costs, and their close ties to families help encourage adoption.
California’s Imperial County, a rural, agricultural area bordering Mexico, is one of the state’s poorest areas, and internet access is scattershot. In Calipatria, one of its smaller cities, City Council member Hector Cervantes pays $67 a month for AT&T internet that isn’t fast enough to qualify as broadband and that he knows “not to mess with” when his 16-year-old daughter and wife need it for school and work, lest they get kicked off.
Imperial County happened to have already created a wireless network for government needs, called BorderLink. It was put to work for the public during the pandemic but is already tapped out in some areas with just a fraction of the county’s 36,000 students using it.
The county has sent 3,500 modems to families and ordered 1,000 more.
“Every day we have administrators asking for more devices,” said Luis Wong, chief technology officer of the Imperial County Office of Education.
GRANT EXCLUDED
One of the first proposals by the new White House was to tackle what Biden has said is a central goal of his administration: promoting racial equity through federal policy.
The idea was a competitive grant program for schools that would give the federal government a more central role in combating long-standing educational disparities that have been worsened by the pandemic.
But as Biden signed the latest coronavirus relief bill into law, his proposed “COVID-19 Educational Equity Gap Challenge Grant” was missing from the $130 billion allocated for schools — the result of pushback from advocates who warned it would have the opposite of its intended effect.
Biden’s push to reopen schools within 100 days — one of the most politically fraught early promises of his administration — stands as one of the first major tests of his promise to infuse the goal of equity into policymaking across the government.
The $2 billion grant program — first unveiled during Biden’s campaign for the presidency — represented only a small portion of the proposed school spending that was generally greeted enthusiastically by experts concerned about disparities in education.
But the proposal would have given federal officials greater say in earmarking some of the new funding for innovative programs specifically designed to promote equity. It generated vigorous opposition, fueling concerns about federal control of local school policy.
Its demise reflects the complexities Biden faces as he attempts to expand the role of the federal government in helping communities achieve lofty goals on race, even while addressing multiple national crises.
With millions of children still out of classrooms — a reality that has been especially damaging for minority and impoverished students — the president is under pressure to quickly reopen the country’s schools and ensure that the most vulnerable communities are prioritized.
“The question that should be asked is: What is the impediment to opening schools for the benefit of kids, and how long are we going to wait to the detriment of the most fragile kids in America today — kids who are in poverty, children of color, children who are English-language learners, and children with a disability?” said Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools, who has argued that schools need to reopen more quickly.
Carvalho, whose district is the largest in the country to have opened all its schools, said he is particularly attuned to the challenges and learning loss students have experienced during the pandemic and the disproportionate impact on underserved students. The district, where 93 percent of students are members of minority groups and nearly three-quarters qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, is in the early stages of assessing and addressing the kind of educational disparities that were exacerbated by the remote-learning experiment that lasted from last March through October, he said.
OTHER WAYS
The Biden administration touted the proposed equity challenge grants in a Jan. 20 news release that described how Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan would help open schools in an equitable way. They were designed to encourage districts such as Miami-Dade to compete to come up with new ideas to combat those disparities, while giving the federal government a larger say in directing educational policy.
But senior administration officials now say they can achieve their goals without the grants. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said other parts of the $130 billion schools package reflect Biden’s central focus on racial justice.
“We felt like the essence of what the president had proposed has been fully incorporated, frankly, and then some,” said a senior administration official involved in the process. Another official said there are other ways the federal government can help guide spending to address equity. The Education Department plans to release additional guidance soon to help schools decide how to spend new money.
“We think one of our biggest tools is the bully pulpit and being able to elevate research and best practices,” the official said.
Inequity is a defining feature of the nation’s school system, a fact that persists nearly six decades after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed racially segregated schools.
Predominantly white school districts got $23 billion more in funding than did predominantly nonwhite districts in 2016, even though they served roughly the same number of schoolchildren, according to EdBuild, an organization dedicated to studying school funding disparities that disbanded last year. Because schools are both locally funded and controlled, students in affluent communities learn in radically different conditions than students in poor ones.
These disparities touch nearly every aspect of education, from the condition of the buildings, to the number of computers and textbooks, to the amount of experience the teachers have. While students in the nation’s most affluent communities learn in state-ofthe-art facilities with veteran teachers, students in the most underresourced schools may be learning in buildings riven with asbestos, from a substitute teacher who may not even have a teaching certificate.
Experts fear the pandemic has compounded those long-standing disparities. Students who are poor, minority or from rural areas have struggled the most with remote learning, according to researchers, school administration officials and Biden’s Education Department.
A McKinsey study cited by the White House found that learning loss among students of color has been “especially acute” and that Black and Hispanic students could be six months to a year behind academically by June because of pandemic-related disruptions.
By contrast, white students were expected to be four to eight months behind. Experts fear the impact could be lifelong for some students.