Schools rewiring to close digital gap

CINCINNATI -- The thousands of miles of wiring frantically being strung throughout America's schools this summer may look like everyday Internet cables. They're actually lifelines of high-speed learning.

They are part of a more than $2 billion nationwide investment to close the gap between public school haves and have-nots, both of which are increasingly dependent on high-speed Internet to teach students.

The bandwidth gap has become the new equality measurement plaguing schools, education experts warn.

Stu Johnson, executive director of Connect Ohio, which advocates and monitors Internet accessibility in schools, says school technology will determine school success.

"It's a situation that makes the use of new, digitally enabled learning technologies a huge challenge and consequently the broadband gap is rapidly becoming the education achievement gap," said Johnson.

Adding to the urgency are the Common Core standards being rolled out in many states in the upcoming school year. Those standards come with online testing ?? which caused some problems among states, like Kentucky, that adopted the standards early.

Your school may be overflowing with laptops, tablets, e-books, smartphones and old-fashioned desktop computers. But they are useless if too many students and educators choke the building's online capabilities.

And federal officials and education experts warn that while the bandwidth gap is narrowing, it will still be too wide even after the latest rounds of new school wiring is done.

"Far too many schools have no Wi-Fi at all. For those that are lucky enough to be connected wirelessly, such networks often don't meet the capacity needs of students and teachers," Federal Communications Commissioner Tom Wheeler said in June.

That could release billions more federal dollars to help U.S. schools catch up.

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Schools rewiring to close digital gap