Onlining in the Time of COVID: Broadband Infrastructure and U.S. School District Policy During the Pandemic

This study examines the relationship between broadband infrastructure quality and U.S. public school district decisions to move classes to a fully remote learning platform during the 2020-2021 school year, during the Covid pandemic. The apparent learning loss that occurred among primary and secondary students with the disruption to in-person learning during the pandemic has been widely reported; less well publicized was a significant narrowing in the “digital divide” for reliable at-home internet access for student educational use that also occurred. I establish some basic facts about internet availability and use in K-12 education during the first full pandemic school year. Chief among these is that reliable access to internet for educational purposes in households expanded substantially throughout the United States during the 2020-21 school year, driven by a massive device and internet subscription distribution to student families by school systems (in turn funded by large Federal subsidies distributed through pandemic relief programs). Estimation of a reduced form linear probability model suggests that pre-pandemic broadband quality played a statistically and substantively significant role in determining when school districts responded to the pandemic with a fully remote online learning model during 2020-21.