Future of Learning: The classroom connectivity divide is effectively closed

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By Tara García Mathewson

It’s not too often people announce big problems solved. But EducationSuperHighway did it this week, announcing that the classroom connectivity gap is effectively closed – one year ahead of schedule, no less.

The nonprofit launched in 2012, and when it explored school connectivity data the following year, it found that just 30 percent of school districts had sufficient bandwidth to support digital learning, or 100 kbps per student. EducationSuperHighway wanted 99 percent of students to have that level of bandwidth by 2020.

The deadline was an arbitrary one, since the nonprofit’s founder and CEO, Evan Marwell, had no idea how long it would actually take to make that amount of progress. “We saw the first big leap of results in the 2015-16 year,” Marwell remembered. “I said ‘OK, this actually could happen.’”

The early finish hasn’t changed the organization’s planned closing date of August 2020. Marwell said they’ll take the extra year to try to reach the 98 school districts in the final 1 percent. The districts serve 750,000 students, after all. And Marwell wants all of them to experience the types of teaching and learning high-speed internet access facilitates.

“When we started all of this, it wasn’t because we wanted to get broadband in every classroom,” Marwell said. “We believed if we had connectivity in every classroom, that would give every teacher the opportunity to take advantage of digital learning.”

Their plan seems to have worked. EducationSuperHighway surveyed school districts and found that 94 percent use digital learning in at least half of their classrooms every week. And 85 percent of teachers support even greater use of digital learning in their schools, according to a recent survey by NewSchools Venture Fund and Gallup.

Marwell acknowledges connectivity is only a starting point. There is still a digital divide in classrooms based on what technology is being used and how. But it’s an important starting point.

“Without the connectivity you don’t even have a chance,” Marwell said.

Send story ideas and news tips to tara@hechingerreport.org. Tweet at @TaraGarciaM. Read high-quality news about innovation and inequality in education at The Hechinger Report. And, here’s a list of the latest news and trends in the future of learning.

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The Shortlist

1. Looking beyond test scores. NewSchools Venture Fund and Transforming Education created an expanded definition of student success, which includes a strong academic foundation, social-emotional competencies, school culture and climate, and success in life. The organizations recently released findings from the second year of a project supporting 40 schools in 16 states that are reorienting themselves around the expanded definition. Among the key insights is that schools should choose priorities within the larger framework for student success and focus on local data, which can be more useful and actionable than statewide or national benchmarks. Among participating schools, growth mindset and perceptions of school safety were most strongly associated with academic performance, while a sense of belonging wasn’t correlated with academic outcomes at all. Read the full report here.

2. Principals increasingly prioritize social and emotional learning. CASEL, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, is out with a new report about principals’ perspectives on SEL. The percentage of schools that have a long-term plan to support social and emotional learning is up 12 percentage points, to 55 percent, and more schools now include SEL in their vision statements and use an evidence-based program to teach it. Almost 70 percent of principals now believe social and emotional skills should be assessed, up from 58 percent in 2017, and almost half now agree these skills should be included in state education standards and guidance (up from 25 percent). One disparity: small town and rural schools lag behind their suburban and urban counterparts when it comes to implementing social and emotional learning. Read more here.

3. No more end-of-year tests? NWEA, a nonprofit testmaker, has a new “through-year assessment” designed to eliminate the need for an end-of-year state test. Students can take adaptive tests in the fall, winter and spring as part of this new system, and NWEA uses their performance to offer growth and proficiency data to educators along the way as well as a summative score that meets state accountability requirements. I wrote about Nebraska’s interest in adopting this type of state testing system last year. Now that the assessments exist, districts in Nebraska are expected to use them in English language arts and math starting in the 2021-22 school year. A consortium of districts in Georgia will use them next year as part of the federal innovative assessment pilot program. Read more here.

4. Who’s going to Palm Springs for iNACOL next week? For the last two years I’ve brought you dispatches from the iNACOL Symposium, and I’m sorry to say I won’t be able to make it to Palm Springs this year, but thousands of educators and education advocates will be discussing the future of learning there. More than 200 sessions promise to explore trends in personalized and competency-based education. Email or tweet me your reflections from the conference. What did you find most interesting? Surprising? Inspiring? Depressing? I’ll include a sampling of what I hear in my next newsletter.