US Needs to Regulate Broadband as It Does ‘Radio Waves’: AFT’s Weingarten
The COVID-19 pandemic “shined a spotlight” on the broadband divide and the digital “skills gap” in the U.S., neither showing signs of abating, Microsoft President Brad Smith told an Axios webinar Thursday. Both were “here last year,” but their impact “is even greater in the current economic climate,” he said. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten joined Smith on the webinar, urging deploying and regulating universal broadband as “a fact of life.”
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The pandemic’s spotlight “helps us see things more clearly, and I hope that gives us the ability and the inspiration we need to take more effective and stronger action to address these problems,” said Smith. “We’re all going to need more digital skills.” He expects the need will intensify every year “in the decade ahead,” he said.
“If you’re a teacher today, oh my gosh, just think about your need to master digital technology in September of 2020, and how that compares to a year ago,” said Smith. “Almost all jobs involve more digital skills than they did before.” The U.S. needs to be “more realistic” in its expectations toward remote learning, said Smith. “We go into the fall being smarter” than in the spring, he said.
Teachers “learned a lot” after being thrust into remote learning so abruptly in March and April, said Smith. “But in many ways, let’s be honest, the kids that lacked a broadband connection in May are probably going to lack it in September as well.” Homes that didn’t have enough digital devices “to go around” in the spring “may still be facing that same problem as they start school in a couple of weeks,” he said.
Universal public education “has been a defining value and attribute of our society,” said Smith. “But we have a huge problem,” he said. “Let’s do the best we can, let’s do everything we can, in the months ahead. But let’s also think ahead, and let’s say 'never again.' Let’s build the kind of infrastructure that will enable all of our kids to do homework after school, and if we face another epidemic or pandemic, we’ll be prepared in a way that we are not right now.”
Remote learning is a “supplement,” never a “substitute,” for in-person classes, said AFT's Weingarten, an opinion she said she held long before the pandemic. “Now we’ve had this huge experiment where I would say virtually every single parent and every single teacher and every policymaker would now arrive at the same conclusion.” But, in a global pandemic, “where you have a virus that is very contagious and spreads asymptomatically, we have an obligation to make remote better,” said Weingarten. “Until we can really decrease community spread in the United States, distance learning and distance working is going to be a fact of life.”
Racial and economic “inequities” are “hugely exposed” during the pandemic, said Weingarten. Her home has at least eight devices, she said. Most low-income U.S. households “had to rush to even get one device, other than maybe a smartphone or a flip phone” when the pandemic closed physical schools in the spring, she said. “Even if they had that device, there may have been three or four people using it,” or there were connectivity issues, she said. “A hot spot does not substitute for connectivity into a home or into a school,” nor for reliable, high-speed Wi-Fi, she said.
Throughout the U.S., “you see this digital divide through the lens of equity and through the lens of wealth,” said Weingarten. “We should be thinking about connectivity like we think about radio waves.” Universal broadband needs to be “a fact of life” in the U.S., she said. “It needs to be free for everyone, and it needs to be regulated in a way that it can be equitably distributed all throughout America.”