The historic march on Washington in August reminded us that the mission of the civil rights movement is constantly evolving. And in this gilded information age, getting everyone connected to broadband Internet has become a part of the movement’s bulwark.
The president’s plan to wire 99 percent of U.S. schools is a much-needed part of the solution, but until we get everyone connected at home, the digital divide will remain. Online homework and wired study guides won’t do much for students who are marooned offline at home.
Being a part of the broadband Internet is no longer optional: 80 percent of U.S. jobs will require digital fluency within the next 10 years, 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies only accept electronic job applications and nearly every aspect of college life has moved online. But today, African-American and Hispanic families lag 10-20 percentage points behind whites in broadband adoption.
Closing the “at home” side of this divide is complicated. Most non-adopters say they just don’t see broadband as valuable to their lives. Others lack the digital literacy to navigate the vast possibilities of the Internet. The cost of computers and broadband service can also be an issue, but it’s not the most important one.
Two years ago, the FCC teamed with the nation’s largest broadband provider to initiate the biggest experiment ever attempted to close the digital divide. The undertaking, known as Internet Essentials, offers a computer for just $150 and heavily discounted broadband service at $9.95 a month to families with a child eligible for the federal school lunch program. There are 314,000 such families in California eligible for the service, about 124,000 in the Bay Area. Participants also can get training in state-of-the-art digital skills.
The government’s private sector partner is Comcast; other companies are undertaking a similar program known as Connect to Compete.
The programs are unique because they not only address the major barrier to adoption — demonstrating relevance of broadband and teaching the skills to use it — but because of the cost-saving incentives. This virtually eliminates the most oft-cited barriers to non-adoption without using scarce public funds.
The combination of hands-on training and inexpensive service and equipment has made this one of the most successful digital divide initiatives ever tried. Nearly 900,000 Americans have joined the program. Eighty-six percent of subscribers use the Internet daily — over half use it for work, two-thirds to access government information and services. That means hundreds of thousands of students will have new learning experiences and new opportunities to find jobs, connect with their families, and apply to college.
A few outlier critics have emerged to claim that the program hasn’t gone far enough. Others don’t like the idea of public-private partnerships, no matter how much good they deliver. Internet Essentials is “ineffective because it is not serving enough low-income households,” another claims.
These naysayers are much like the critics of the Affordable Care Act: squeaky wheels offering glib criticisms and no solutions. The reality is no other digital divide effort has come close to yielding these returns.
We need every idea on the table. That means scaling up what works and finding new ways to make the Internet compelling to those who see it as irrelevant. But it’s going to take a village of these kinds of creative public-private partnerships to bridge the digital divide. It took years of neglect to open so wide. It’ll also take years of hard work to close.
Hilary O. Shelton is NAACP Washington Bureau Director and Senior Vice President for Advocacy. He wrote this for this newspaper.