Today, national non-profit EducationSuperHighway announced, in its “2017 State of the States” report, more than 39 million students in America have access to high-speed Internet at school. In its third year of releasing the status of broadband connectivity in the nation’s K-12 public schools, EducationSuperHighway highlights that an additional 5.1 million students gained vital access to high-speed Internet in the classroom. This year’s results show that 94 percent of school districts nationwide now meet the minimum 100 kilobits per second (kbps) per student goal set by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 2014. Source: State of the States Report 2017 (EducationSuperHighway.org)
The report confirms that America continues to make extraordinary progress in narrowing the K-12 digital divide. Overall, 39.2 million students, 2.6 million teachers, and 74,000 schools are now achieving the minimum connectivity goal that gives students equal access to digital learning opportunities. However, 6.5 million students are on the other side of the digital divide without access to high-speed Internet. A divide that is particularly wide in the 1,587 rural K-12 schools that don’t yet have the infrastructure necessary to revolutionize the way teachers teach and students learn.
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The State of the States report is based on an analysis of 2017 FCC E-rate data representing 11,038 school districts, 72,707 schools, and more than 39.3 million students.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
