Biden plan prioritizes digital divide
Proposal includes $100B to extend fast web access
WASHINGTON — Kimberly Vasquez, a high school senior in Baltimore, faced a tough problem when the pandemic began. She had no fast internet service in her home, but all her classes were online.
Marigold Lewi, a sophomore at the same school, was regularly booted off Zoom classes because of her slow home connection.
Lewi spent a lot of time explaining Zoom absences to teachers. Vasquez sat outside local libraries to use their internet access and at times used her phone. The two of them helped push a successful public campaign for better and free service to low-income families in the city.
“It was very chaotic,” Vasquez said. “We had to do this because no one else was going to change things.”
A year after the pandemic turned the nation’s digital divide into an education emergency, President Joe Biden is making affordable broadband a top priority, comparing it to the effort to spread electricity across the country. His $2 trillion infrastructure plan, announced Wednesday, includes $100 billion to extend fast internet access to every home.
The money is meant to improve the economy by enabling all Americans to work, get medical care and take classes from wherever they live. Although the government has spent billions on the digital divide in the past, the efforts have failed to close it partly because people in different areas have different problems. Affordability is the main culprit in urban and suburban areas. In many rural areas, internet service is not available at all because of the high costs of installation.
“We’ll make sure every single American has access to high-quality, affordable, high-speed internet,” Biden said in a speech Wednesday. “And when I say affordable, I mean it. Americans pay too much for internet. We will drive down the price for families who have service now. We will make it easier for families who don’t have affordable service to be able to get it now.”
Longtime advocates of universal broadband say the plan, which requires congressional approval, may finally come close to fixing the digital divide, a stubborn problem identified and named during the Clinton administration. The plight of unconnected students during the pandemic added urgency.
“This is a vision document that says every American needs access, and should have access, to affordable broadband,” said Blair Levin, who directed the 2010 National Broadband Plan at the Federal Communications Commission. “And I haven’t heard that before from a White House to date.”
Some advocates for expanded broadband access cautioned that Biden’s plan might not entirely solve the divide between the digital haves and have-nots.
The plan promises to give priority to municipal and nonprofit broadband providers but would still rely on private companies to install cables and erect cell towers to far reaches of the country. One concern is the companies will not consider the effort worth their time. During the electrification boom of the 1920s, private providers were reluctant to install poles and string lines hundreds of miles into sparsely populated areas.
There are also many questions about affordability. It is one thing to extend service to homes; it is another to make it inexpensive enough for people once it gets there. The White House was scant on details Wednesday, though it stressed subsidies alone were not a long-term solution.
In addition, the money would arrive more than a year after the pandemic closed schools and as many were starting to reopen their doors. As a result, many students without good internet connections have already fallen a year behind.
About 25 percent of students do not have adequate broadband at home, with Native American, Black and Latino children hardest hit, said Becky Pringle, president the National Education Association, the teachers union.
Biden’s plan would be tested in places like Chinle, a school district in the Navajo Nation in northeast Arizona. As with electrification, the most remote homes got service last. Today, many homes in that isolated corner of the state have no access to broadband or speeds that are so slow even one device on a Zoom conference takes up most of the bandwidth. Cellular phone service is nonexistent or spotty in many parts.
School is slowly beginning to return to the classroom. But until last week, 31 buses were sent out daily with packets of printouts for homework and flash drives with videos of lessons for math, science, history and English. The graduation rate is expected to be near 60 percent this year, down from 77 percent last year, said Quincy Natay, the superintendent of the Chinle Unified School District.
“It has been a tough and challenging year,” Natay said. “A lot of learning loss has occurred for this group.”