School Children Without Internet. We Could Fix That.

COVID has forced American public school students to learn online. But nearly half don’t have broadband and 20 percent aren’t connected at all. While we’re debating UBI, why don’t we invest in making the lives of others better?

There was a time when the federal government used tax dollars to incentivized ordinary Americans to work to improve the lives of other ordinary Americans. It wasn’t a bail out. It wasn’t a hand out. It wasn’t UBI. It was a vision and a well-financed, properly-administered plan. And it worked out very well.

Back in 1936, nearly 90 percent of farms lacked electric power because the costs to get electricity to rural areas were prohibitive. Franklin D. Roosevelt worked with Congress to establish the Rural Electrification Administration (REA). The federal government didn’t build the system. Instead, the REA made loans to electric cooperatives that were repaid over 30 years. Rural citizens came together, organized cooperatives, and provided labor to build the systems that they ultimately came to own.

With taxpayer money, solid administration and sweat equity, life in rural America was transformed from seemingly unending drudgery and deprivation to a new level of prosperity. World War II got in the way, but by 1950, close to 80 percent of U.S. farms had electric service, according to Harold D. Wallace Jr., the associate curator of the Electricity Collections at the National Museum of American History.

It took federal intervention, President Roosevelt pointed out, because private interests couldn’t turn a profit and wouldn’t touch it. “The practice has been too frequent in the past for private utility companies to undertake to serve only the more prosperous and more populous rural sections,” he said. “As a result, families in less favored and in sparsely settled sections were left unserved. I believe that our postwar rural electrification program should bring modern service of electric power to the farm families in the back country.”

Oral accounts from rural Americans about “the night the lights came on” are heart- rending. People who lived on farms that got electricity didn’t have to pump water and wash clothes by hand. Their food could be refrigerated. Life got better fast.

So why can’t we do that for online learning?

How can it be that American school children are camping out in school parking lots to get enough connectivity to listen to their lessons. How can it be that 17% of U.S. schoolchildren don’t have connectivity at all? How exactly are they supposed to be learning now that public education has gone remote? In New York City, where 1.1 million kids attend public school, 225,000 are still waiting for devices like laptops or Ipads. But even if they get the devices, and honestly, what is New York waiting for, they may not be able to zoom into their schools.

I’m reading a lot about Universal Basic Income — and I’m not sure how I come down on it. On the plus side, it might afford a great number of low-income people some basic dignity when it comes to housing and medical care. On the minus side, it seems like it would be an impossible program to ever unwind once we started it. It seems like the government could use it in a coercive way (for example, deny it to convicted felons, or people with politically unpopular opinions or who exhibit what the government might consider anti-social behavior ) Mostly, I worry that it is reifies the power structures in our culture and insures that those with privilege and power never have to share.

I guess we’ll all see how this plays out in public discourse. And make up our own minds. But here’s a notion: while we’re waiting for UBI to move forward or not, wouldn’t it make sense to take tax payer money and pay regular people to organize themselves into broadband cooperatives. They could do something concrete that could potentially unleash learning, innovation and entrepreneurship for all Americans A sort of REA for internet connectivity?

Worth considering.