{
  "id": "1998-august-assessing-the-e-rate",
  "slug": "1998-august-assessing-the-e-rate",
  "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1998-august-assessing-the-e-rate.html",
  "year": 1998,
  "month": "August",
  "monthNum": 8,
  "headline": "ASSESSING THE E-RATE",
  "kicker": "Hookup hangups",
  "author_name": "Bob Sullivan",
  "author_title": "",
  "affiliation": "MSNBC",
  "summary": "A journalist discovers that wealthy school districts are disproportionately applying for technology funding through the FCC's E-rate program, while poorer regions lag behind, suggesting the initiative meant to bridge the digital divide may be widening it instead.",
  "keywords": [
    "schools",
    "technology",
    "funding"
  ],
  "topics": [
    "Education",
    "Data & Databases",
    "Investigative Methods"
  ],
  "technologies": [
    "World Wide Web",
    "FTP"
  ],
  "full_text": "Here's a story with two lessons. First, listen to your father. Second, even if you start your story with data, you can ultimately bail on it and still end up with a good story.\n\nAnd the good news is this story involves data on virtually every school district in the country - it would be easy to localize.\n\nMy father is a computer teacher and technology coordinator at two private schools. For several months, he consistently whined to me about a new requirement to fill out a \"technology plan\" for both schools. I figured he was just complaining about paper work. But one day he mentioned that he had been inundated with junk mail from PC makers, software makers and the like. Why? Well, those technology plans were being put up on the Web. The plans, he explained, included a wish list of all the equipment his schools hoped to purchase in the next few years to connect it to the Internet. So \"service providers\" were making their pitch, and hard.\n\nOK, maybe I'm not yet smart enough to listen to my dad, but when someone says \"those have been posted on the Web,\" my ears perk up.\n\nBefore the weekend was up, I had downloaded a database of computer equipment wish lists from 23,000 schools around the country. Then I worked backward to figure out what I was looking at.\n\nLopsided access\n\nI was looking at the real-life implementation of one of the initiatives of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That law mandated that the FCC set up a program essentially to re-route money from telecommunications companies to schools - well, really telecommunications consumers to schools. The goal: universal access to the Internet for all schools.\n\nSo the FCC created a nonprofit called the Schools and Libraries Corporation to administer the program, now called the E-rate, or Education Rate. The SLC decided to dole out approximately $10 billion over 5 years in the form of discounts. The discounts up to 90 percent for the poorest schools - were determined by the percentage of students eligible for school lunch programs. The SLC had schools file wish lists (Form 470) and then settle on contracts with service providers (Form 471) after a bidding period. After all the 471s were gathered, the SLC sent letters confirming funding for the discounts.\n\nThe database I downloaded represented Form 470s only - i.e., the wish lists, not the contracts. No dollar amounts were attached. But I was curious to see if there were any patterns in the data, if some areas of the country were taking advantage of the program more than others.\n\nWhen I sorted requests by state, it quickly became evident that states like Washington and New York applied for much more equipment than states like Arkansas or North Carolina. In other words, it looked like there might be a \"rich get richer\" story here - already technologically hip areas were getting more equipment, while \"unconnected\" parts of the country weren't even participating.\n\nApplying for uncertain funding\n\nHere's where the real reporting came in. I wouldn't have had a story without the help of Dateline NBC's Andy Lehren, formerly of NICAR. Andy had experience working with the Department of Education's Common Core database. If my hypothesis were true, we'd be able to find poor schools that didn't apply for E-rate money.\n\nSo Andy sorted schools in Arkansas, North Carolina, West Virginia and several other states that had more than 75 percent eligibility for federal school lunch programs, then cross-referenced those schools with the SLC database. It didn't take long to find poor schools not in the SLC database.\n\nSpending several weeks calling those schools gave me a great, real-life picture of how difficult the E-rate application process was - and why some schools didn't apply. More important, found an even larger story. Every school that applied for E-rate money was stuck in limbo: E-rate funding was expected in late winter or early spring. Schools that had applied either went ahead with their purchases by spending their own money and hoping E-rate funding would come through, or, more likely, just sat and waited.\n\nPosted warnings\n\nThere's plenty of caveats to using this data in your story, though. Most important, not every application for service is included in the now 24,000 or so applications you'll see. Only requests for \"new service\" are included. Schools were allowed to apply for discounts for existing service provider contracts, but they are not included. Schools were also allowed to apply for discounts on plain old phone service, but those applications are not included, either. Finally, some schools applied as cooperatives. You should also know that schools were able to enter their own applications on the Web, making the data pretty dirty. I had to remove hundreds of duplicate records. All that said, however, you'll find downloading the data and looking at schools in your area to be a great starting point for a story on how well your schools did with their E-rate applications. As an added bonus, every application comes with a contact name and phone number (usually the district's technology coordinator), so it's an invaluable resource.\n\nAlso note that the database contains only some of the raw numbers culled from each school's application. The applications themselves can also be retrieved (one at a time) from the SLC Web site. If you're going in-depth on a few schools, you'll want to see the actual application, which contains lots of additional commentary. The SLC folks agreed with me that, because of the cooperative factor, the most accurate way to sort the data was to examine it state by state. It is interesting to see which states applied for more new services than others. Interesting, but not as conclusive as the interviews to which the data led us. In the end, after considering to omit reference to the data, we only included one chart - a ranking of states that asked for the most new video hookup services per student. We gave it no more credibility than any other source in the story. One more caveat found explaining the SLC and the E-rate process to be pretty tricky. Prepare your editor for some tortured paragraphs if you're really interested in fully explaining how the funding mechanism works.",
  "provenance": {
    "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6",
    "extracted_at": "2026-07-05",
    "verified": true
  },
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  "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1998-august-assessing-the-e-rate.html",
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}