Robert Pearlman

If they build it, will we come? If government, the telephone and telecommunications companies, and the cable industry join to develop the backbone of the information highway and its local access ramps, will schools and school districts invest in the local telecommunications infrastructure that will ensure universal participation by the nation's over 40 million K-12 students and their teachers?

While the government's goal to "extend the 'universal service' concept to ensure that information resources are available to all at affordable prices" (IITF, 1993) may be a reasonable short-term policy for federal government action, it is at best only a first step toward the more appropriate goal of universal participation (Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, 1993) on the information superhighway by the nation's students and teachers.

The universal service goal, which borrows an analogy from telephone service, means that governments use regulation to require private companies with regional monopolies to provide the public with access to minimal services at affordable prices. Still, after 100 years of telephone service and over 60 years of regulation, there are few telephones in schools today. Few school districts in the country have seen the educational and communication services on the telephone network that would justify both the ongoing service costs and the up-front investment in a local school-based telephone infrastructure that would ensure universal participation by students and teachers. Many more factors than access will be needed to justify an investment in a computer-based telecommunications infrastructure that provides the pathway to universal participation on the information superhighway.

The national debate on education today stresses as its goals not just access to education but instead high standards of what students know and can do. It is the active participation on the information superhighway that helps students develop the planning, interpersonal, informational, technological, and communication skills required by the knowledge-based citizens and workers of the 21st century. If such skills are the goal of long-term federal policy for K-12 education, then universal participation is the appropriate strategic goal of federal policy.

Neither federal nor state government action can assure K-12 education both universal access to and widespread student utilization of the information superhighway. Smart regulation and investment can, however, encourage organizational change in schools and the emergence of new educational service providers on the information superhighway. These new services will, in turn, provide the incentive for local communities to invest in the development of an adequate and sufficient local school and school district telecommunications infrastructure.

Government goals, at both the federal and state levels, must be to ensure K-12 access to the future national information infrastructure (NII), to provide equity for all students, and to support the development of information resources for education. Such goals, however, will not be realized