OPINION:
Last week, the Federal Communications Commission voted to review the E-Rate program, which funds internet access for schools and libraries.
“Over the last several years — and especially during COVID-19 — many schools dramatically increased screen time for kids, with many students now swiping for hours every day,” FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said on June 3. “The important role that technology plays in schools should support learning, not distractions or declining performance.”
The Telecommunications Act of 1996, signed into law by President Clinton, established E-Rate to ensure that schools and libraries would not be left behind in the then-dawning internet age.
Thirty years later, the program has expanded well past that original mission, and so has the internet itself. What was once primarily a tool for research and learning has all too often become a toy for constant distraction.
Given its track record of overexpansion and underperformance, a top-to-bottom review is long overdue.
By the mid-2010s, as internet speeds improved and online learning became feasible, President Obama looked to expand the program. Instead of retaining the goal of connecting every school to the internet, he shifted the goal to connecting every individual student to the internet.
In June 2013, Mr. Obama launched the ConnectED initiative at Mooresville Middle School in Mooresville, North Carolina, and called on the FCC “to connect 99% of America’s students to high-speed broadband internet within five years.”
Mooresville was a deliberate choice, as its district offered every student in third grade and up a laptop and high-speed Wi-Fi, and had shown rising test scores. Mr. Obama attributed the school’s success to its internet program, but the district had also made several changes to its instructional and management practices.
A 2014 New York Times headline about it read, “Mooresville’s Shining Example (It’s Not Just About the Laptops).” Still, that same year, the Obama FCC made a $2 billion down payment to expand connectivity through the E-Rate program.
Today, a little more than a decade later, parents and teachers have begun to revolt against devices in classrooms, on the heels of a largely successful (and still growing) campaign against smartphones in schools. Obama-era EdTech optimism is more or less dead. We now have years of evidence showing how distracted students have become because of technology in schools, even as their academic performance declines.
“The Chromebook is just a world of distraction,” Anna Soffer, a middle school teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District, told The Associated Press in the article “America’s tech-filled classrooms are facing a backlash against school-assigned devices.” She continued, “Every day, I’m battling, ‘Who would you rather listen to, Ms. Soffer or Minecraft?’”
The Biden administration went with Minecraft. In 2023, the FCC unlawfully extended the E-Rate program to cover Wi-Fi on school buses, despite Section 254 of the Communications Act restricting E-Rate support to services provided explicitly in “classrooms and libraries.” A school bus is neither.
Beyond that, as Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Republican, and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Washington Republican, noted in a letter opposing the move, the expansion of E-Rate did not fix the program’s preexisting problems.
“There is little evidence the program has helped improve learning outcomes or that schools would not be connected without the subsidy,” they wrote in their letter. “E-Rate primarily benefits large, wealthy school districts, rather than poor rural schools. It is full of waste, fraud, and abuse. It is notorious for overbuilding existing networks. According to the former FCC Inspector General, there is a cottage industry of ’consultants who extract a significant amount of money from applicants’ by taking advantage of the program’s complexity.”
In fall 2025, the Trump FCC reversed the school bus Wi-Fi decision — a welcome correction. As Mr. Carr said, “Those [Biden-era] FCC decisions spent scarce taxpayer dollars on funding unsupervised screen time for kids without accounting for the significant attendant risks.”
Now, with the fuller E-Rate review the FCC is undertaking, there is an opportunity to go further.
For those of us who want better schools, this is fantastic news. E-Rate deserves serious reform precisely because our students do.
We do not need to be Luddites who reject all uses of technology to understand that taxpayers should not have to foot the bill for children to access unfettered internet brain rot in places where they are supposed to be learning.
• Neeraja Deshpande is a policy analyst at Independent Women.
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