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The average graduation rate for the state of Texas in 2018 was 83.2%. This is a comparable figure to graduation rates in other states, and more urban counties of the state – like Bexar County in San Antonio and Travis County in Austin – were well above this figure. However, the graduation rate of the sparsely populated Val Verde county in South Texas, even though it contains Laughlin Air Force Base and draws military families to where others might not normally live, was a scant 68.2% that year.
One of the causes of this disparity may be that, in an increasingly digitized world, reliable and efficient internet services are more and more imperative to a student’s educational journey. Like students around the world, Texan students are acutely aware that the pandemic has made it daunting to do school work without high speed internet last spring. Words like “disruptive” and “traumatic” filled headlines about adjusted educational experiences, and Zoom classrooms became an unexpected and precarious substitute for everyday instruction. Many believe the pandemic caused a huge educational crisis, but for low-income students in rural areas, it merely exposed an existing issue - their lack of reliable home internet.
Modern schoolwork often requires broadband to be completed. Broadband is internet that downloads at 25 megabits per second or faster and uploads at 3 megabits per second or faster: this is the form of throughput most conducive for online work. With broadband, you can engage in video conferencing and streaming media without (much) lag. Without broadband, it takes about fifty-three times longer to complete a simple task like downloading an email attachment. While broadband has largely been brought to schools in the state - 83% of Texas school districts have broadband - issues arise when students go home with homework that implicitly requires decent internet in order to be completed.
This is particularly difficult for students of low socioeconomic means in the more isolated parts of our state. Beyond anecdotal evidence, there are few hard statistics that focus specifically on the burden rural students face in their internet needs. However, we do know that 1.25 million rural Texans - one in every four - lack access to broadband infrastructure, as compared with one in fifty urban Texans. Furthermore, a third of Texans said that there was indeed broadband in their area, but that it was priced beyond their reach, according to a 2015 study by Connected Nation (an NGO dedicated to broadband adoption research). These statistics make evident the serious inequity in the ability of low-income rural students to keep up in school because of their lack of internet resources at home. Moreover, when the pandemic forced the closure of public facilities, rural students lost access to the precious public resources they used to keep up with their schoolwork - fast, free internet at schools and public libraries.
While all this may appear daunting, there are short term stopgaps that can help keep these students afloat. And in the longer-term, there are solutions that can bring the education of rural students into the same century as urban and suburban students – if we are willing to devote sufficient resources to implementing them.
The lack of internet which these students grapple with isn’t solely due to the difficulty of getting broadband to all of vast rural Texas. Many students in sparsely populated areas relatively closer to cities still find themselves unable to use broadband because they can’t afford it. Barry Haenisch from the Texas Association of Community Schools (TACS), a group dedicated to supporting the roughly 88% of Texas school districts with fewer than a thousand students each, recalls a conversation he had with a superintendent of a small school district less than forty miles from Houston. “He said, ‘Yeah, we have broadband, but our broadband costs are four times what they pay in Houston. We are seventy five percent low socio-economic in this community...so although we have [access], it does no good” (Barry Haenisch, 2020). Lower income communities, even those adjacent to a resource-rich city like Houston, have been forced to leave their students stranded without reliable internet at home for far longer than the pandemic has been occurring, because broadband adoption just isn’t financially feasible. The pandemic then spread this struggle to everyday classwork as well, and forced instruction to be delivered through sporadically freezing screens.
It’s hard to point fingers to who is responsible for such barriers to internet access - is it a market gap unaddressed by internet providers? Is it the responsibility of the state to develop stronger policy initiatives? Haenisch is wary of the state’s current plans for expanding affordable broadband access. His ambivalence stems from a number of worries: grants are inadequate compared to the number of communities which need to be served, implementation is very “hit or miss,” and there is not an apparent systematic way in which communities are being served (Barry Haenisch, 2020).
Some may argue that it is reasonable to assume companies will eventually see market opportunity and find a creative way to meet demand. In examining the role of internet providers, Dr. Josh Goodman - a professor of Education and Economics at Boston University who has studied how rates of search intensity for online learning resources changed with the onset of the pandemic - finds it difficult to pinpoint an incentive for providers to wire rural areas, given that they haven't done so already (Dr. Josh Goodman, 2020). When providers do reach rural communities, it’s often not with affordable enough services, limiting the actual adoption and use of high speed internet in those areas.
This is a complex problem, with no sinister public or private sector actors purposely withholding resources. But when it comes to education, this is a problem that requires an urgent solution because the more these students struggle, the more the gap in their educational opportunities will affect their futures. The American education system - an institution which has never been accused of dazzling market efficiency - must serve students in the immediate term, even if the market cannot. Every rural student that is forced to spend six hours doing work that would take an urban or suburban student one or two is a casualty of American education. Rural students have to work harder with fewer resources for the same opportunities to learn, and a market need that will eventually be met does not serve the earning potential of today’s students, who remain perennially left in the lurch.
Certain solutions, while difficult in some aspects, stand out as promising possibilities. Some steps that can be taken immediately and with little cost on the local level are to check in with students on their ability to complete online assignments at home and to audit the community's internet resources. Some students would benefit more from paper packets and less online-reliant work, and many teachers are already implementing this strategy (Barry Haenisch, 2020). Since many students rely on the public library for internet resources, it would also be prudent for school districts and city management to work together to see where improvements could be made for students who don’t have access in their homes. One school district in Cincinnati, Ohio upgraded an ordinary school bus to make it a traveling classroom and wifi hotspot for students to do schoolwork in around the town. Creative solutions like this can be effective stopgaps while policy makers and providers work on the best way to expand to the rural market and make services affordable enough to encourage adoption. And in the long term, it would benefit both policy research and market research if established groups like Connected Nation gathered statistics and strategies on a more frequent basis and with an emphasis on analyzing the conditions of internet access for rural students in particular.
The most important factor to remember that broadband inaccessibility is an issue that will long outlast the attention it receives from the Covid-19 pandemic. While we may think the pandemic created a digital gap in schooling based on students’ internet access at home, it in fact has merely spotlighted an ongoing, unaddressed issue. As states now consider new restrictions amidst the biggest rise in Covid-19 infection rates since the pandemic began, many schools are being shuttered in lieu of new or continuing restrictions on businesses. Rural students without access to affordable broadband will again lose crucial access to instruction and motivation in their educational journeys. In Texas, those affected often live in less visible parts of the state. Education is the most potent form of human capital, and a commitment to education can drastically change the lives of young folks. Scaling the educational resource of the internet to reach low income, rural students that are just as bright, driven and deserving of all the tools they need to succeed as any middle class, suburban student in the Texas system should be at the forefront of policy goals in Texas.
Citations
“Graduation Rates.” Open Data Network. Socrata. https://www.opendatanetwork.com/entity/0500000US48453-0500000US48029-0400000US48/Travis_County_TX-Bexar_County_TX-Texas/education.graduation_rates.percent_high_school_graduate_or_higher?year=2018&ref=related-peer .
“Laughlin Airforce Base.” MyBaseGuide. 2017. https://mybaseguide.com/installation/laughlin-afb/community/laughlin-air-force-base/ .
“Policy Brief: Education During Covid-19 and Beyond.” United Nations. August, 2020. https://www.un.org/development/desa/dspd/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2020/08/sg_policy_brief_covid-19_and_education_august_2020.pdf .
Walker, Tim. “Helping Students and Educators Recover From Covid-19 Trauma.” neaToday. August, 2020. https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/helping-students-and-educators-recover-covid-19-trauma .
Utilities Code, Title 4. Delivery of Utilities Services, Subtitle B. Provisions Regulating Delivery of Services. 2019. https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/UT/htm/UT.181.htm#:~:text=181.048.,per%20second%20or%20faster%3B%20and.
“Differences Between Dial Up and High Speed Internet Connections.” Plug Things In. http://www.plugthingsin.com/internet/connection/dialup-vs-high-speed-internet/ .
Ramsey, Ross. “Analysis: Shopping for students without schoolrooms, Texas is spending $250 million to narrow the digital divide.” The Texas Tribune. August, 2020. https://www.texastribune.org/2020/08/14/texas-schools-remote-internet-access/.
“Rural Broadband: A Texas Tour.” Connected Nation. October, 2018. https://connectednation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/The-Future-of-Rural-Texas-2018_5-Rural-Broadband.pdf.
Barry Haenisch (executive director of TACS) in discussion with the author, October 2020.
Dr. Josh Goodman, email message to author, October 27, 2020.
Dimmich, Scott. “Sycamore Schools turns decommissioned school bus into a mobile STEAM classroom.” October 2017. https://local12.com/weather/weather-articles/sycamore-schools-turns-decommissioned-school-bus-into-a-mobile-steam-classroom .
Cargile, Erin. “Nearly 40 Texas school districts have asked to halt in-person learning for 5+ days due to COVID-19 cases.” KXAN Austin. November, 2020. https://www.kxan.com/investigations/nearly-40-texas-school-districts-have-asked-to-halt-in-person-learning-for-5-days-due-to-covid-19-cases/
Rosenzweig, Dan. “Texas shut down bars to slow the spread of coronavirus — but allowed thousands to open through a restaurant loophole.” Texas Tribune. November, 2020. https://www.texastribune.org/2020/11/25/texas-bars-loophole-restaurants-coronavirus/ .
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