Economic professors Austan Goolsbee and Jonathan Guryan examine how effective the federal E-Rate program has been on student learning, in this Winter 2006 article from Education Next. Launched in 1996, the federal program sought to ensure that all schoolchildren—regardless of income—had the opportunity to learn in a classroom wired to the World Wide Web. Under the program’s mandates, schools received subsidies to buy Internet technology, with poorer schools receiving more funds. Billions of dollars have been given to schools since 1998, when the government first started doling out E-Rate subsidies. But what impact has the program had on student achievement?
A version of this news article first appeared in the Around the Web blog.
