Our Schools, Cut Off From the Web

Luis Ubinas:

ON June 6, at a middle school in Mooresville, N.C., President Obama set a goal of high-speed Internet in nearly every public school in America in five years. It was a bold and needed pronouncement -- except that in 1996 President Clinton said virtually the same thing, calling for libraries and classrooms to be "hooked up to the Information Superhighway by the year 2000."

Many people reading this article are probably doing so on a smartphone, tablet or computer. They might not know that half of Americans don't own a smartphone, one-third lack a broadband connection and one-fifth don't use the Web at all.

Since 2007, when I was named president of the Ford Foundation, we've given $44.5 million to dozens of organizations -- like Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Mozilla Foundation and the Media and Democracy Coalition -- to make the Internet more accessible, affordable and mindful of privacy.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at June 19, 2013 12:03 AM
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