Measuring Broadband in Schools
New America’s Education Policy Program and Open Technology Institute are teaming up on a pilot project with the Alexandria City Public Schools district in Northern Virginia.
By Chris Ritzo and Lindsey Tepe
21st Century Classrooms. Future Ready Schools. Next-Generation Learning.
These phrases have become a part of a popular new lexicon describing the changes happening across America’s schools. What is often overlooked, however, is the foundation upon which many of these new technologies rest: equitable, reliable, and robust Internet access supported by up-to-date broadband infrastructure.
Alexandria City Public Schools (ACPS), a suburban school district of 14,670 students in Northern Virginia, is a case in point. It has been implementing new technologies in classrooms for decades; but like many schools around the country, the district continues to grapple with maintaining up-to-date infrastructure to support digital instruction.
This fall, New America’s Education Policy Program and Open Technology Institute are launching a project in partnership with ACPS to take a closer look at the day-to-day technical experiences and challenges that the district’s students and teachers face. Do they have the Internet speed they need to get their work done? Are some days worse for connectivity than others? What does adequate broadband access at the classroom level really look like? These are among the questions we will be tackling in this pilot project, Measuring Broadband in Schools, with the goal of better understanding how next-generation learning is playing out in America’s classrooms.
Before now, researchers have analyzed Internet access from the 30,000-foot view, examining the current state of connectivity across the country.
For example, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has reported that two-thirds of America’s school districts have an inadequate foundation for digital learning, with many reporting that not a single school in the district will be able to meet national high-speed broadband targets, set at 1 gigabit speeds for every 1,000 students. This means that the vast majority of teachers and students do not have access to the bandwidth they need to fully utilize online resources, negatively impacting teachers’ ability to fully leverage these new tools while planning learning opportunities in their classes.
Further, reliable data about schools’ network speeds and overall health is not readily available. While companies are required to advertise their service speeds, they do not have to report actual on-site speed or monitor and report on the quality of their service. Many schools also lack the tools, resources, and time to properly assess their networks. This continuing absence of transparent data about network speed and performance is a significant barrier to improving school connectivity.
Over the past few years, state governments and nonprofits have begun to take steps to help fill in the blanks on school districts’ connections. Earlier this year, Alaska released a comprehensive broadband audit detailing the connectivity of its 500+ schools across the state’s 53 school districts. Beginning in the summer of 2014, this yearlong labor-intensive process required site visits by network engineers to every district in the state. EducationSuperHighway, a national nonprofit, has also helped to illuminate the state of connectivity in districts. Using newly released data from the FCC’s E-rate program, EducationSuperHighway’s ongoing data analysis is tracking district progress toward national connectivity goals.
But these kinds of efforts have not yet shown the actual day-to-day technical experiences within classrooms. Students are accessing school networks to conduct research, query online databases, watch videos, and collaborate in real time via web-based tools. Yet setting national speed targets and overall measures does not necessarily help us understand the quality of those daily experiences.
The Measuring Broadband in Schools project will be a first step toward filling in this gap in understanding.
The project will leverage free tools developed by Measurement Lab (M-Lab), an initiative within the Open Technology Institute that serves as a global Internet measurement and open data platform. The M-Lab project has a history of collecting and synthesizing broadband performance data, and since 2009 has been used by multiple telecommunications regulatory organizations worldwide. This includes the FCC, which uses M-Lab’s platform to gather part of its data for the Measuring Broadband America Report.
For this pilot study with ACPS, M-Lab has developed a device prototype that will automatically run Internet measurement tests from within a school’s network. (The device uses the Network Diagnostic Tool — developed and maintained by Internet2 and hosted on the M-Lab platform — which will run at regular intervals to collect network performance measurements.) These devices will run in four ACPS schools to regularly collect data on schools’ network performance. Additionally, ACPS teachers throughout the district — at the elementary, middle, and secondary levels — will be collaborating with us to provide insight into technology use in the classrooms, both on the types of tools students and teachers are implementing, as well as their daily experience with Internet connectivity. We plan to use both network data and teacher input to better understand how current broadband service is serving the needs of teachers and students.
This new project is one of several new initiatives aimed at bridging the divide between the tech and policy communities. OTI’s work in this area is made possible in part by a philanthropic seed investment from entrepreneur and investor Reid Hoffman and by additional partners soon to be confirmed.
As this work progresses, it has potential to scale beyond a single district. This pilot study with ACPS is a first step toward creating what we hope will become a replicable, mixed methods research approach that we then plan to test with additional partner districts. As districts around the country seek to build future-ready schools to deliver next-generation learning, their leaders will need better measures of just how equitable, reliable, and robust their Internet networks really are.
Chris Ritzo is a senior technologist with New America’s Open Technology Institute. Lindsey Tepe is a policy analyst with New America’s Education Policy Program.
