The FCC needs to send Wi-Fi hotspots to schools to close the homework gap

Living with the coronavirus will reveal hard truths about the digital divide.

This is especially true for students, who are told in record numbers that they need to go to education online. It’s time for a nationwide plan to make sure they can all get there. Like so much else, the internet has changed education. The days when extracurricular learning required only paper and pencil are long gone. Today, students live online and use internet resources for so much of modern education.

However, not every child has broadband at home. Actually, statistics at the Federal Communications Commission suggests that one in three households does not have broadband access.

Imagine you are a child in one of those households. Nighttime schoolwork is a challenge. To get it done, you may need to go to a friend’s or family member’s home with broadband, go to the library, or have a soda in a fast food restaurant with free Wi-Fi.

These students fall into a particularly cruel part of the digital divide, known as the homework gap. According to the Senate Joint Economic Committee, the homework gap is real and affects 12 million children across the country. A study of census data from the Associated Press suggests that as many as 18 percent of students do not have reliable internet access at home and are struggling with school assignments that require it.

Now consider the corona virus. Schools are closed across the country. In some places, this happens at the state level, such as in Ohio, Maryland, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Louisiana. In others, such as in California and Washington, schools are only closed in cities or counties where the risk of spreading and contracting the virus appears to be greatest.

School administrators and teachers in those regions are already struggling to determine how education can continue as children have to stay at home for weeks. Setting up online learning is a challenge under the best conditions and requires time, training and skill. Because of this virus, all those things are scarce. But in an extra-great effort to ensure that students have the opportunity to learn while cutting lessons, these online efforts are vital. We must do what we can to make these efforts successful for all students, including those who fall into the homework gap and are most at risk of being left behind.

To fix this, the FCC should use its strength in this emergency to provide schools with Wi-Fi hotspots to lend to students who don’t have reliable internet access at home. It is authorized to do so under the Telecommunications Act. This law, now more than two decades old, commissioned the agency to set up a program to support Internet services in schools across the country, through a program known as E-Rate. Today, E-Rate funds broadband for educational purposes in every state. In fact, it is the largest educational technology program in our country.

By law, support for Internet services is available for “educational purposes” to improve school classes to the extent technically feasible and economically reasonable. With schools closing and learning to migrate online, now is the time to change FCC rules to expand our view of Internet access and the traditional classroom. In addition, there is already support to do this from beneficiaries of major programs, such as schools and teachers.

Furthermore, the E-Rate program offers support on a sliding scale. More is available for schools with higher percentages of students having lunch for free or at a lower price. That means the schools that get the most E-Rate support are likely to be the schools with students who don’t have broadband access at home.

Another possibility is for Congress to support and support such initiatives in future efforts to address the coronavirus crisis. Homework gap reports have already been prepared in both Houses of Congress, including legislation introduced by Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Representative Grace Meng (D-NY). These efforts may include legislation to extend student access to devices as well.

But the most important thing is to act now so that no child stays offline.

Jessica Rosenworcel has been a member of the Federal Communications Commission since 2012.