SPEECH OF FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION CHAIRMAN REED E. HUNDT SEVENTH ANNUAL MILKEN FAMILY FOUNDATION NATIONAL EDUCATION CONFERENCE Los Angeles, California May 2, 1996 (As Prepared for Delivery) "The School Bell Merger: Communications and Education" Good afternoon. It's a great honor to be here with you. My wife and I have three children, and of course like all parents we know there is no one more important in our lives than our children. And we also know that outside the home there is no one more important in the lives of our children than you teachers, principals, superintendents, educators. You are the partners of every parent in the country in the great, mysterious, difficult, loving effort to raise the next generation. This is the effort to keep the American Dream alive. This is the effort that must be made anew again and again -- because the test of that dream is always whether there is more one generation to share it. You are more than holding up your end of our partnership. Your country is grateful to you. So I thank you very much for inviting me to speak to you. I come with great news: in February Congress passed a law that will give you new hope and new ways to meet the challenge of your jobs. It's my privilege as chairman of the FCC to try to write the rules to give meaning to this new law. If we are successful our agency's initials could stand for Fostering Children and Community. This is why it is true that I have the best job in government you don't have to get elected to. And it's even a better job now that Congress has passed the new Telecommunications Act of 1996. The new law turns the 1934 Communications Act upside down. Before we encouraged monopolies. Now we want all the communications businesses to compete with each other. But at the same time, the new law extends the public benefits of communications. For the first time this new law gives us a national policy of making modern communications available, accessible and affordable to absolutely everyone. And most wonderfully, the new law specifically requires that the FCC write rules that make modern communications available to every teacher and to every child in every one of our two million classrooms. Everyone accepts the fact that local telephone service should be priced low enough so that 95 to 100 percent of all homes can afford it. That was always the policy in all states; it is now the federal law. But that same idea of universal service now extends to every classroom, every teacher, and every library. We charge a tiny bit extra for long distance and call forwarding and other phone services, so that basic local telephone service can be priced affordably low. That gives us universal service. In writing the rules for this new law we need to figure out what services should be set at a slightly higher price so that basic local service to homes AND to classrooms can be low enough to be affordable. This goal is even more important than ever before because universal service now means access to the information highway. Moreover, because of the new law, universal service to the classrooms may be provided by the cable company with two-way modems that use cable in the classroom to give internet access. It may be provided by the new wireless companies starting up with the licenses that we have auctioned for $20 billion. It may be provided by cable companies who are already providing educational commercial-free programming to over 35 million school children through their Cable in the Classroom service. It may be provided by the long distance companies that are entering the local markets. These businesses should compete with each other to meet the challenge set by President Clinton in his State of the Union speech in 1994 and again in 1996. He said we should connect every classroom to the information highway by the end of the century. When he signed this new Telcom Act he wrote his vision into law. Now at the FCC, working with the states and with educators we must use the provisions of this new law to meet the President's challenge. What do you in education need from communications technology? A better question would be, what don't you need? I was a lawyer for almost 20 years before I got my current job. But before I was a lawyer I had a respectable job. I was a teacher. I remember so well the frustrations and the opportunities, the disappointments and the hopes that are so plain to every teacher every day to this very day. The school where I started teaching was built in what you might fortress style. To approach it you had to pass through a chain link fence with protective barbs on top, cross a moat, then walk up three floors, past the gauntlet of security guards and then into the classroom. The classroom: broken slate, a handful of pieces of chalk, chairs uncomfortable or broken, a few maps showing that Hawaii and Alaska are territories that might someday be states, and 35 books for 175 kids, who came through in five classes that like tsunamis rolled through the room in fifty minute intervals. I am sure there is no industry in the United States that relies so much on the imagination, courage, and fortitude of employees to get the job done on their own, without help, without tools, without infrastructure, as the education business. Why do we try to make teaching as hard as possible? So many schools today resemble today the school I walked into in the fall of 1969. At my school 50% of my seventh graders, on average, were not expected to graduate from 9th grade. And of those who entered high school, less than half would graduate. And of those, less than half might go to any level of college. The prospect of obtaining a college degree was less than a one in ten chance for my students; and the prospect of getting an advanced degree -- of becoming a lawyer or a teacher -- was beyond dreaming. That classroom was a killing ground for the American Dream. Teachers and educators know far better than I that there are many steps to success in education. Parents must be involved. Curricula must be reinvented constantly. Schools need to be rebuilt. Security and discipline are essential. The school day should be longer. Teachers should be paid better and given more training. But you also know that it would not hurt one bit the cause of teaching if every teacher has the same tools available to every employee who signs up at, say, Wal-Mart. If you go to get a job as a shipping clerk at Wal-Mart the first thing they show you is not the loading dock or the truck. The first thing they show you is the computer. It's on a network. Everything about Wal-Mart is revealed in the computer, accessible through that network. Why doesn't every teacher have at least the same tools? Shouldn't every teacher walking into every classroom have a computer on a network that gives that teacher access to dozens of options, iterations, variations for the daily lesson plan? That gives the teacher emails from parents, other teachers, the principal explaining how kids and the school will interact that day? That gives the teacher the ability to ask questions of other teachers, of parents, of experts in colleges or universities, all by the pushbutton magic of email? That gives the teacher the chance to take the children into a neighboring school, or a neighboring country to learn from others? Shouldn't that teacher also have in that classroom computers that enable students to work in groups, or that permit the faster or slower child to proceed at his or her own rate in a learning experience developed for the child's unique situation? Shouldn't the teacher be able to mainstream a child with disabilities, by using computers on networks to give the child ways to overcome hearing or visual difficulties? Shouldn't every teacher be able to put together videoconferences to share learning experiences with other teachers, even other countries? Shouldn't every parent with access to a computer have the ability to send a message to the teacher, to stay in touch with their child's education? Under the new law the FCC should contribute the tools, funding mechanisms, techniques to put the backbone of the info highway in every classroom. If we do our job right you should be able to count on Net Day in California early this year becoming every day in every state. The FCC's contribution to the reinvention of education for an information age must be matched by actions of others to provide other necessities of life and work in an information age: computers that can ride the networks, training for teachers, curricula reform so that education and communications will be firmly bonded, security so that this new and expensive equipment will be maintained. That is why we are working so closely with Education Secretary Dick Riley to make sure that the FCC gets his guidance as we write our rules. But Secretary Riley would be the first to say that we need to reach out to every school, principal, superintendent to seek participation in the great national effort to build an information education world. Ira Fishman, the head of our education task force, will be talking to you tomorrow about the fundamental issues in our FCC rulewriting. He will tell you that by November 8th, a joint board of FCC members and state public utility officials must decide on the right rules to do connect all classrooms. Already we have received about 250 detailed suggestions. We need you to tell us which ideas are the right ideas. At the outset we have to define the scope of the job. The mandate given to the Federal Communications Commission most directly relates to the costs of connection. According to McKinsey & Co., those costs represent $8 billion for initial deployment and $1.5 billion for ongoing annual operations. This is a lot of money compared to zero. . . and a small amount of money compared to the size of the information economy. Over the next five years, annual revenues in the telephone market will total over a $1 trillion dollars. And according to the McKinsey report, annual costs, including connection, hardware, course content, professional development, and systems operation, would represent only 3.9% of the total K-12 expenditures in the year 2005. We also have to find a way to translate a national mandate into a system that meets the individual needs of states, school districts and individual schools. We need to know what schools really want and need. Should we try to create a menu of communications services with affordable prices set by our rules? Should we try to create a fund from which the schools can draw direct purchasing power for whatever services they feel they need? Should we empower the schools to buy whatever they feel they need and require providers to offer the same price to schools that they would offer to their best customers? Should we guarantee at a minimum that there are substantial discounts for a wideband technology such as ISDN? Should we make sure that communications services are priced at different levels depending on the relative wealth of different schools? How can we make sure as we build the networks that schools are not locked into outdated technology? Of course even if the FCC drops the ball and writes rules that are a failure, still modern communications will be inevitably adopted in the classrooms of some children. I mean the children from high income families. In every city and town in this country high income families are bringing their own children onto the information highway. They are watching their children learn in ways thought impossible only a few years ago. Encyclopedias are on disks that fit in your palm. Dictionaries are hidden behind tiny symbols on a laptop computer screen. Primarily in high income neighborhoods Apple already sells $3 billion a year of education technology. John Dewy said that the way each of us wants our own child to learn is the way we should want all children to learn. Yet there is no part of our society that is more inherently unequal for children than education. A child's opportunities in education depend overwhelmingly on the accident of birth. A child born in Mississippi grows up in a state that spends $2500 a year on public school education; a child born in Connecticut receives $11,000 in funding for education per year. Does anyone think the Connecticut child more deserving? Children are the only true innocents. They should -- we all know -- be given equal opportunities in education. In the promise of communications technology we now have a new chance to deliver on the obligation of creating equal opportunity. Networks in poor neighborhoods or rich suburbs equally deliver at lightning speed the learning of the Library of Congress. The dawning of the Information Age represents an opportunity for equality that we have not enjoyed since Horace Mann first championed the idea of the free public school. When I was teaching in that school I told you about it seemed to me that the only way for my students to succeed was to get out. The only way out was to go a magnet school, where the opportunities were so much greater than in my school. To get into that magnet school students had to pass a test. My seventh graders on average read at a 4th grade level; they had no chance to pass. But I took the most promising group -- only three of my 175 kids -- and tutored them every Saturday morning for months before the test. I suppose this could have made a good movie. Michelle Pfeiffer, Edward James Olmos, Lou Gossett, Jr. -- these great actors would have wanted to be in the movie. But a successful movie must have a happy ending. No movie will ever be made about my teaching or my students. There was no happy ending. None of my students passed the test; none escaped to the magnet school. Communications technology should give every child in every classroom in every school in every neighborhood a chance to escape the confines of their fortress school . . . to escape the limits of their surroundings. . . but without taking an unpassable test. . . without moving to an unaffordable neighborhood. Communications technology offers the chance to break down walls without tearing down walls. It is the chance to deliver to the children of the children I let down a quarter of a century ago. That's something I sure would like to do, and I need your help. So I know you won't let me down. I know you'll help us write the simple rules that extend the opportunities of the 21st century to all the children in our country. Many thanks.