Time Ripe for Technology Revamp in Schools, Officials Say

Rosenworcel wants the commission to issue an order revamping the E-rate program in the first half of 2014, she said. “We have to move with dispatch at the FCC.” Rosenworcel encouraged educators throughout the country -- not just the “usual Washington folks” -- to submit comments on the E-rate proposal that “asks somewhere been a hundred and a million questions.” The commission should take “that giant universe” of possibilities and “identify a handful of goals and start organizing people around it,” she said. “Somebody is going to lead on this,” either the U.S. or the rest of the world, she said. “I think we can be the ones who lead."

"This is not just about hitting numbers, or keeping up with the Joneses,” said Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council. President Barack Obama’s ConnectED education initiative is not just about connectivity for its own sake, but about what it means for “the potential of our kids,” he said. Sperling commended telecom companies for responding positively to the prospect of an E-rate revamp. But any time there’s an effort “to marshal resources for a good cause,” there will be “some blowback,” he cautioned: It’s important to “depoliticize” this issue.

"The U.S. will far fall behind in the 21st century economy if our classrooms don’t evolve beyond a 19th century model,” said acting FCC Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn. “We are not where we need to be on digital learning, both relative to other nations, and to the rate of technology adoption in other sectors of our society.” Broadband “has the potential to be the great equalizer for our children,” she said. For E-rate to be a success, “we need good data if we're going to get this right,” she said. “Good data drives good policy."

The most immediate barrier to digital learning is inadequate infrastructure, said the LEAD Commission in a report released Tuesday (http://bit.ly/17Un3yu). It proposed upgrading the wiring of schools with high-speed broadband, encouraging model schools, and building a “national initiative” to put “learning devices” in the hands of all students by 2020. “The plummeting costs of laptops, tablets, and other digital learning devices, as well as innovative cloud-based software and enterprise Wi-Fi technology, allow for this initiative to be affordable,” it said.

"We are at a fundamentally different place in time,” said Jim Shelton, acting deputy secretary of the Department of Education. “The macro forces” are “working for us,” he said. But outdated policies -- the way policymakers think about textbooks and constrain schools -- still get in the way of a revamp, he said. That has “a lot to do with leadership” at every level of the educational system, said Shelton. It makes sense that educators haven’t spent a lot of time figuring out how to use technology in education, given that for a long time there were only three computers at the back of the classroom, one of which was “guaranteed not to work,” he said. Now is the time to change things, he said: Every time the country has invested in a wide scale on infrastructure or research and development, it has benefited everyone.

"Education reform is obviously central” to ensuring this is a globally competitive country with equal opportunity, said Rep. John Delaney, D-Md. To “improve outcomes, broaden access and bend the cost curve,” educators and policymakers have to “fully embrace technology,” he said. Technology has accomplished those goals in other industries, and it can in education, he said. It’s especially important to make sure teachers understand how to utilize the technology instead of “pushing back on it,” he said. Delaney has introduced an infrastructure bill with bipartisan support “that uses overseas earnings -- it’s very complicated -- to fund infrastructure in a fiscally appropriate manner,” he said. In May, Delaney introduced the Partnership to Build America Act. HR-2084 “would finance the rebuilding of our country’s transportation, energy, communications, water, and education infrastructure through the creation of an infrastructure fund using repatriated corporate earnings as well as through utilizing public-private partnerships,” said a news release at the time (http://1.usa.gov/15TZBhZ).

There’s a real opportunity to revamp costs at the local level, said David Cohen, Comcast executive vice president. Costs there aren’t being driven by the “uneducated nature” by which many districts go about their purchase decisions, he said. It’s a “consultant-driven process” that depends on what the consultant tells a school to buy, he said. Cohen recommended designing “an almost TurboTax-like online template” to let schools determine how much bandwidth they would need. That might “take some of the consultant control out of this process,” he said.

Schools don’t know what to do or where to start, said Janet Davis, Verizon associate director-wireless education strategy. They often don’t know what bandwidth they need either, she said. It’s important for any E-rate program to collect enough data to understand how much bandwidth is enough, said Davis. John Bailey, executive director of Digital Learning Now, agreed on the importance of a basic level of technology knowledge by local administrators. “I've met a lot of superintendents who know they want the connectivity,” he said. “They just don’t have the language and the vernacular to describe it.”

Cohen cautioned that the surest way to “start taking unbelievable incoming fire from Democrats and Republicans” alike is the notion that a tax increase will be needed to implement the E-rate super-fast broadband program. “We have to figure out a way to characterize this so that people don’t think that there is a multi-billion dollar tax increase,” he said. “That is a harsh, practical reality of the world in which we're functioning ... that will take a lot of interesting creativity by a lot of smart people.”