Evan Marwell / commentary
July ane, 2013

Evan Marwell

Evan Marwell

The state budget that Gov. Jerry Brown signed last calendar week includes $1.25 billion to accelerate the adoption of the Common Cadre in California. Two weeks ago, President Obama announced the Continued Initiative to connect 99 pct of America's K-12 students to 1 gigabit of bandwidth in the next five years. Together, these bold programs have created a moment of opportunity for California'south K-12 schools to transform teaching and learning by upgrading their classrooms for 21st century learning.

The 21st century classroom will leverage technology to ameliorate educatee outcomes by personalizing learning, empowering our teachers and ensuring every educatee has equal access to compelling curricula. At the foundation of the 21st century classroom is robust Internet infrastructure. Our schools need ubiquitous wireless networks and 100 megabits of Internet connectivity (growing to one gigabit in the next five years) to back up ane-to-i digital learning. (To put this in context, it takes about i.five megabits to stream standard definition video in the classroom. Assuming every student is using video every bit a learning tool at his or her ain pace, you'd need 45 megabits of connectivity for a 30-student classroom.)

Unfortunately, according to EducationSuperHighway's National SchoolSpeedTest, but 23 per centum of America's schools have the bandwidth they need for the 21st century classroom and only 27 percent have sufficient bandwidth to implement the Smarter Balanced Assessments that are critical to the successful implementation of the Common Core. The most common problems: slow connections to schools, outdated content filters that create network bottlenecks and a lack of ubiquitous high speed wi-fi. Even in Silicon Valley, only 39 percent of schools take the Cyberspace infrastructure they demand.

So why practice we have this trouble? In role, it's because computers are moving from the primary's office and computer lab to the student's desk – increasing the demand for bandwidth by more than than 30-fold. Its also partly a lack of resources: Few schools take the capital letter to upgrade their wi-fi networks and even fewer can afford the specialized networking and purchasing expertise needed to blueprint, implement, monitor and manage a mission-critical network. But it is also a lack of articulate data about where our schools stand and what needs to be done to upgrade them for the 21st century. Equally the old adage goes, you tin't manage what you tin't measure out.

The state's new Common Core Implementation Fund and Continued provide a unique moment of opportunity to address this foundational issue. If the FCC modernizes the E-Rate program to provide the funding the president has called for, the ConnectED Initiative will enable California districts to deploy fiber-optic networks that connect their schools at speeds up to 10 gigabits. Similarly, the Common Core Implementation Fund provides districts with the funding to upgrade the wired and wireless networks needed to deliver high-speed Internet connectivity to every student's device.

Only funding alone is not enough. Nosotros are all the same in an era of scarce resources and the Common Core Implementation Fund needs to support device and content purchases and professional person development in addition to network upgrades. As a result, information technology is critical that California's commune leaders create a data-driven plan to implement these upgrades in order to ensure that all potential bottlenecks to digital learning are addressed in a cost-effective manner. Given the lack of technical resource in California's districts, Gov. Brown, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson and the Land Board of Teaching must find a way to help districts create their upgrade plans.

San Mateo County provides a model approach to upgrade planning that can hands be replicated across the state. Led by the Canton Function of Pedagogy, San Mateo utilized the costless National SchoolSpeedTest to quickly identify which schools need to be upgraded. They are now working with my nonprofit, EducationSuperHighway, to identify what needs to exist upgraded in each district. As a final step, districts are sharing information about the cost of Internet connectivity and equipment in gild to identify opportunities for cost savings. Collectively, these efforts will enable San Mateo County to create a data-driven upgrade plan in less than iii months and will position their districts to make optimal use of the funding bachelor from Continued and the Common Core Implementation Fund.

California's teaching leaders must take responsibility for ensuring that every district in California has the information it needs to make the near of this opportunity to upgrade classrooms for the 21st century. In an era of deficient resources, it is imperative that California's school districts do their homework before committing the i-time funding that the governor and Legislature accept had the vision to provide.

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Evan Marwell is the CEO of EducationSuperHighway, a nonprofit with the mission of upgrading the Internet infrastructure in America's K-12 schools for digital learning. Before becoming a social entrepreneur, Evan founded companies in the telecommunications, software and finance industries.

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