Trenton Goble: Online learning is leaving behind millions of students without internet access

In the past few months, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought so many changes and challenges to the education sector that it’s difficult to keep track of them all. Students and teachers alike have moved to online learning platforms en masse due to school closures, which has led to countless issues with adapting lesson plans and ironing out the wrinkles with video conferencing technology. One challenge that’s flown under the radar, however, is the millions of students across the country without reliable access to the internet who are now being left behind in the great online migration.

Easy access to the internet is one of the great invisible divides of our era. Many of us have taken it for granted for so long that it’s difficult to imagine things could be different for others, but the numbers don’t lie. According to an analysis from the Pew Research Center, more than a third of all households (35%) with school-age children did not have any form of high-speed broadband internet services in 2015. The problem is even worse for students in rural areas — 39% of rural residents nationwide lack any basic option for high-speed internet access, and in 15 states, that figure rises to more than half. Whether it’s the unaffordable cost to lower-income Americans or the geographic challenges of extending access to larger rural areas, many issues have contributed to this problem.

What does this mean for these students? Without high-speed internet access, many of the online learning platforms and video streaming and presentation services that schools are now using to keep the school year moving simply aren’t an option. At an individual level, teachers and administrators have stepped up with heroic efforts to hand-deliver study materials and homework assignments to students without online access. But these are stopgap solutions, and this is ultimately a problem that cannot be solved at an individual level. Even with educators doing all they can to try to make this transition work, we’re still seeing heartbreaking stories like in Phoenix, Arizona, where three teenagers were found “huddled under a blanket outside a closed elementary school” just so that they could use the school’s wi-fi access to complete homework they couldn’t do at home.

And that only covers the students who are still making an effort to overcome the odds and find ways to connect, however unorthodox they might be. For others, there are no interim solutions available, and they may simply be falling behind further and further each day. Some teachers are reporting that more than half of their students are simply not logging on to online learning resources at all, with the problem magnified in areas with limited internet access.

We already know plenty about how much progress students lose to the summer slide when they’re out of school for months without any educational stimulation. COVID-19 and our nationwide experiment in online learning threaten to make the situation even worse. Experts are already warning that we may be in the midst of a “COVID slide” for millions of students, and that’s just considering the weeks of education that have already been lost. When you add the upcoming summer break and the fact that some schools are already weighing whether on-campus classes should return right away in the fall into the mix, you have a recipe for disaster.

It is heartening that some leaders on Capitol Hill have stepped forward to try to address this issue. Some have proposed allocating billions in funding that the Federal Communications Commission (FTIC) would share with school districts to buy routers and other internet infrastructure equipment to help keep students connected. Measures like these would be a start, but the full scope of the problem here is tremendous. COVID-19 has exposed a major gap in our national education system — one that won’t be closed until reliable high-speed internet access is a given for everyone.

Whatever the pathway looks like, it’s clear that we can’t afford to wait any longer. An entire generation of students may be taking a giant step backward that will impact the rest of their lives — all through no fault of their own. Online learning resources offer so much promise to help us weather this crisis and even improve education long after the pandemic has ended. But they won’t make the impact they could until every student can access them. Our goal can’t be anything short of that.

Trenton Goble is vice president of K-12 Strategy for Canvas, part of the Salt Lake City-based Instructure. He is a former school principal and author of the book “Reclaiming the Classroom: How America’s Teachers Lost Control of Education and How They Can Get It Back.”