Online School Doesn’t Work When You Can’t Get Online
Why millions of American kids don’t have internet
At 8 a.m. Pacific time last Wednesday, I joined David Anderson’s 12th-grade government class at Live Oak High by clicking on a Zoom link.
Because California suffered a surge in coronavirus cases this summer, students in Live Oak, a town about 50 miles north of Sacramento, will be learning virtually for the foreseeable future. Both Anderson and his students seemed nervous about how it would go. At 8:03, only eight of the 24 students had logged on, despite the fact that Anderson’s “classroom expectations” sheet requested that everyone “log in to class on time and prepared every day.”
It might not have been the kids’ fault. Many students are poor in this rural chunk of the Sacramento Valley. The school ordered Wi-Fi hotspots for the students, but they won’t be available until August 22. In a class Anderson taught that afternoon, one boy’s video kept freezing from a slow connection. At the high point during the class I observed, 20 of 24 students had joined the Zoom session, which, Anderson told me later, is “better than expected.”
Not all distance learning in rural areas is functioning even this smoothly, thanks to America’s notoriously unequal internet access. In the COVID-19 era, life has moved to the internet, but not everyone has it. As many districts start virtually this fall, some teachers say they’re fighting to ensure that all of their students can log into class each day. Their struggles are just one example of the consequences of America’s failure to get all of its citizens online before this uniquely internet-dependent time.
Outside of Fresno, Rachel Cooper estimates that 20 percent of her eighth-grade students don’t have internet at home, and 20 percent have spotty internet. “It’s rough,” she says. Some kids are using their phones to log into class, but the screens are too small to do work on. Some kids’ internet cuts out in the middle of class, and others don’t log on at all.
The school hasn’t been able to provide hotspots to all of its students yet, Cooper says. A Wi-Fi–equipped bus is supposed to drive around to areas where disconnected students live, but social distancing would require that students sit outside of it to do their work. “I’ve had several students already say that they were really nervous they were going to fall farther behind in a specific subject because they think distance learning is going to be really difficult,” Cooper told me.
How did such an advanced country leave so many people technologically behind? Experts and former Federal Communications Commission officials describe a federal government that has neglected to treat broadband as a public utility, instead relying on the largely self-regulated internet industry to provide service wherever it wanted, for the price of its choosing. The United States government has historically not seen fast CONTINUE READING: Online School Is Harder Thanks to Unequal Internet Access - The Atlantic