The funding was announced Friday alongside a sweeping set of proposals for K-12 education in California as part of the annual May revision of the governor’s budget proposal. Altogether, K-12 education spending in the current budget proposal totals $121.7 billion, the highest level in California’s history.
Education looked drastically different during the 2020-21 school year as most California schools kept buildings closed and offered distance learning during the pandemic. But even now, as only 16% of students are back in class full-time, thousands of students still don’t have access to their own computers at home to log into online classes, and even more lack affordable high-speed internet that they can rely on regularly to log into class.
Newsom’s $7 billion investment in broadband, which comes from President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act, would be spent over three years and is aimed at expanding broadband access and building fiber networks, making internet more affordable and increasing access to high-speed service.
Only 52.4% of Californians are using broadband at 100 Mbps, according to the budget summary, which is the typical speed required for video conferencing and other basic uses.
“This is an opportunity… to finally close this digital divide and do justice,” Newsom said Friday. “Let’s get this done once and for all. This is what the federal stimulus from my perspective was all about, catalytic investments to make generational CONTINUE READING: Broadband gets a major boost in California budget revision | EdSource
For American families and their children, school is more than just a building. It's a social life and a community, an athletic center and a place to get meals that aren't available at home. The pandemic has disrupted — and continues to disrupt — the lives of U.S. students in profound ways.
Many kids haven't set foot in their schools since March, when most in-person schooling shut down across the country. Teachers are working tirelessly to educate their students online, but they are growing increasingly anxious about the kids who aren't showing up at all.
An estimated 3 million students may have dropped out of school learning since March, according to Bellwether Education Partners, a national nonprofit that focuses on underserved youth. The group's study cited a lack of Internet access, housing insecurity, disabilities and language barriers as major obstacles to attending virtual classes during the pandemic.
"It is really, really unsettling," says Alex, a teacher in western Virginia, who asked that her last name not be used for fear of repercussions for speaking out. "I think people don't realize how much we need to see these kids. A lot of times in schools, we are the first line for seeing signs of child abuse, for seeing signs of food insecurity. And you don't have that with virtual students. Especially when they ghost."
That "ghosting" is a constant problem for school employees who track attendance in CONTINUE READING: Audio: A Quiet And 'Unsettling' Pandemic Toll: Students Who've Fallen Off The Grid | 89.3 KPCC
If you are a Comcast customer in the Northeast US, changes are coming.
2021 will bring caps for home internet customers in Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Vermont, West Virginia, and DC, as well as selected slices of North Carolina and Ohio.
There are reasons not to freak out.
First, the cap is at 1.2 TB, which is a huge amount of data. Comcast says it's good for 21,600 hours of streaming music, 500 hours of streaming HD shows, 34,000 hours of online gaming, or 3,500 hours of video chatting.
Second, for other parts of the country, this is not new. Comcast started capping accounts in other parts of the US way back in 2016.
So, we're probably not looking at any sort of major issue right now.
However, as we contemplate the probable increased interest in internet-based schooling, it's a good time to remember that internet access is currently not free, not infinite, and not universal.
If the Biden administration wants a goof internet policy project to tackle, let's look at pandemic schooling as a clear sign--again--that internet access should be a public utility, like water and electricity. It's way past time.
Early in the pandemic, one of our MediaJustice Network members reached out to us in hopes we could support a group of high school students in Baltimore who were trying to amplify their campaign. The students are leaders in a Latinx and immigrant student organization called Students Organizing for a Multicultural and Open Society (SOMOS), and this was their first time organizing for digital equity.
When school ended last year, SOMOS realized that many of their fellow Baltimore city schoolmates who’d relied on Comcast’s Internet Essentials discount program didn’t have a connection fast or reliable enough for online school. Whenever they could get into virtual classes, they’d often get kicked off multiple times a day and sometimes multiple times during a single class. Households with multiple students or family members working from home had to schedule who could be online, when and for how long. Families were put in impossible situations, forced to negotiate whose education or work was more important, and who would have to sacrifice and fall behind.
Philadelphia MediaJustice Network member Movement Alliance Project (MAP) had been working with allies and students on a #ParkingLotWifi campaign highlighting stories that have become all too familiar in 2020: parents and students sitting in parking lots (like Taco Bell) just to get access to WiFi for CONTINUE READING: How Our Biggest ISPs Are Failing Students During COVID-19 - PopularResistance.Org
When Joe Biden is inaugurated as president on January 20, he stands to oversee a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that could do remarkable things. Among other things, the new FCC could bridge the digital divide, ensuring all Americans have access to the internet. But even though Biden’s victory is assured, the future of the FCC hangs in the balance.
The Trump administration’s FCC has had a particular agenda. Under the leadership of Chairman Ajit Pai, the agency has pushed to deregulate the industries under its purview and, in turn, to create a business-friendly environment with few rules, little accountability, and minimal oversight for some of the biggest and most powerful companies in the world. In the months and years to come, the FCC is likely to reverse some of those policies, especially Pai’s most controversial decision: repealing net neutrality, a policy that required internet service providers to treat all types of internet traffic the same. But getting broadband internet in as many homes as possible during the pandemic is many Democrats’ most urgent goal, and one they feel the Trump administration failed to accomplish.
“Because the Trump FCC failed to meaningfully address the digital divide, tens of millions of Americans still lack high-speed internet,” Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) told Recode. “This worsens the impacts of the pandemic, and the Biden administration has to take this head-on.”
She added: “Every person in our country must have high-speed internet. Period. We’ve failed for too long to expand access to rural and tribal areas, and too many urban communities can’t afford broadband.”
The Biden administration’s FCC can and likely will aid this effort by making the internet CONTINUE READING: How Biden’s FCC could fix America’s internet - Vox
The litany of tragedies and inconveniences visited upon Americans by COVID-19 is long, but one of the more pronounced sources of misery for parents has been pandemic schooling. The logistical gymnastics necessary to balance work and school when all the crucial resources—time, physical space, internet bandwidth, emotional reserves—are limited have pushed many to the point of despair.
Pandemic school is clearly not working well, especially for younger children—and it’s all but impossible for the 20 percent of American students who lack access to the technology needed for remote learning. But what parents are coming to understand about their kids’ education—glimpsed through Zoom windows and “asynchronous” classwork—is that school was not always working so great before COVID-19 either. Like a tsunami that pulls away from the coast, leaving an exposed stretch of land, the pandemic has revealed long-standing inattention to children’s developmental needs—needs as basic as exercise, outdoor time, conversation, play, even sleep. All of the challenges of educating young children that we have minimized for years have suddenly appeared like flotsam on a beach at low tide, reeking and impossible to ignore. Parents are not only seeing how flawed and glitch-riddled remote teaching is—they’re discovering that many of the problems of remote schooling are merely exacerbations of problems with in-person schooling.
Emily Gould: Remote learning is a bad joke
It’s remarkable how little schools have changed over time; most public elementary schools are stuck with a model that hasn’t evolved to reflect advances in cognitive science and our understanding of human development. When I walked into my 10-year-old son’s fourth-grade classroom a year ago, it looked almost exactly like my now-28-year-old son’s classroom in 2001, which in turn looked strikingly like my own fourth-grade classroom in 1972. They all had the same configuration of desks, cubbies, and rigidly grade-specific accoutrements. The school schedule also remains much the same: 35 hours of weekly instructional time for about 180 days. The same homework, too, despite the growing wealth of evidence suggesting that homework for elementary-school children (aside from nightly reading) offers minimal or no benefits. Elementary education also values relatively superficial learning that’s too focused on achieving mastery of shallow (but test-friendly) skills unmoored from real content knowledge or critical thinking. School hours are marked by disruptions and noise as students shift, mostly en masse and in age-stratified groups, from one strictly demarcated topic or task to another. Many educators and child-development experts believe that some of the still-standard features of pre‑K and elementary education—age and ability cohorts, short classroom periods, confinement mostly indoors—are not working for many children. And much of what has changed—less face time with teachers, assignments on iPads or computers, a narrowed curriculum—has arguably made things worse.
As distance learning has (literally) brought home these realities about how we educate young children, an opportunity to do things better presents itself—not just for the CONTINUE READING: Remote Learning Isn’t the Only Problem With School - The Atlantic
In the aftermath of the most consequential election in our lifetimes, I thought I’d take this opportunity to offer some free advice for state Democratic parties interested in attracting even more new voters and turning more red state legislatures blue:
Let’s put a lot more focus on two issues that are critically important to building a stronger, more informed voter base, and have the potential to excite and unite both rural and urban communities…
1. Better, more affordable access to broadband internet service
In a digital age, access to fast, secure internet service is not only a basic human need–akin to utilities like electricity, water, and gas/oil–but it’s a requirement for candidates building a digital campaign infrastructure. Not being able to reliably connect to persons in remote areas of your state, or to those who live in urban areas plagued by internet deserts, severely hampers the ability to convey a candidate’s or party’s message, policy beliefs, or positions on issues. It also leaves persons without reliable internet access to the mercies of our information sources like Fox News or the Detroit News–meaning that they are less informed than someone with no media access at all.
2. Improve support for public education, including community colleges and state universities
One of the single largest predictors of voting patterns is the level of education among a group of potential voters. In general, the more educated a person is, the more likely that person is to vote, and to vote for Democratic candidates. Areas and states with a lower percentage of college-educated voters tend to vote Republican, and more educated areas tend to vote for Democrats. It CONTINUE READING: So, Now What? Let's Focus on Public Education and Internet Access | Eclectablog
