On a cloudy Tuesday afternoon in San Marcos, California, Guadalupe Lopez is guiding me through Alvin Dunn Elementary’s concrete grid of a campus. Dressed in a black sweatshirt with Minnie Mouse ears on the hood, she’s striding along with the eager confidence of a soon-to-be 7th grader just weeks away from the first day of summer. And she has something special she wants to show me.
Charging several steps ahead, she leads me into the school’s cafeteria, where dozens of black and white photos of Alvin Dunn sixth graders cover the wall. The photos, Lopez explains, are part of a research project that she and a small group of her classmates recently completed on why American businesses and government agencies should invest in at-risk youth.
“They’re spending so much on prisons, but they’re leaving us behind,” Lopez tells me, sounding far more sophisticated than she should at 12. To illustrate their point, Lopez and her group took photos of each of their classmates and asked them all to write captions explaining why they’re worth the investment. “Some of them just touch your heart,” Lopez tells me, sincerity radiating from her big brown eyes.
During the month she spent researching both in and out of school, this topic has become deeply personal to Lopez, and as she stares up at the wall, it’s clear she is proud of her hard work—work that would have been a lot harder if not for the fact that a few months earlier, the school gave every sixth grader a Samsung tablet to take home with them.
That, in and of itself, wasn’t all that special. Alvin Dunn students had been using iPads in class for years. But what made a truly deep impact in Lopez’s life was the fact that the tablet had its own data plan. That meant she could actually take it home with her and use it. It was a tiny difference, but for Lopez, it changed everything. Like about 30 percent of American schoolchildren—and more than half the sixth grade class at Alvin Dunn—Lopez has no Internet access at home.
Lack of home Internet access for school children is an all-too common problem, one that the FCC has referred to as “the homework gap.” Today, American schools are investing billions of dollars in devices and educational technology for the classroom. Meanwhile, venture capitalists are investing billions more to fund new ed-tech ideas. All this spending has changed curriculums, as teachers become ever more reliant on the tech tools constantly dangled in front of them. Now, instead of handing out reading assignments and worksheets from a textbook, they can show kids videos from Khan Academy and assign them apps that collect data on their progress.
This type of personalized education has been transformative for some kids. But for the hundreds of thousands of students across the country like Lopez, it’s isolating. For these kids, replacing the albeit imperfect equity of pen and paper with technology has put them at a distinct disadvantage, turning something as simple as completing homework into a Herculean effort.
For Lopez, it meant waking up most mornings at 7am, getting to school when the gates open at 8am, and logging onto the school’s WiFi, leaving her with just 45 minutes to complete all of her digital assignments before her first class. That changed once she got the tablet with the data plan. Suddenly, she had time to do more than cram in the mornings. Internet access sent her reading scores soaring; more than that, it gave Lopez the time she needed to do the kind of work that she really cared about, the kind of work she would enthusiastically speed across campus to show off to a total stranger like me.
Lopez owes this change, at least in part, to a new business unit within the San Diego-based wireless giant Qualcomm. The unit, Qualcomm Education, is working to close the homework gap by convening other leaders in the wireless technology industry to help create the equivalent of a free-and-reduced lunch plan for data.
With this work, Qualcomm is capitalizing on a wave of momentum in the world of school connectivity. In addition to the federal ConnectEd program, which aims to give 99 percent of American students access to the Internet in school, the Obama administration also recently announced the launch of ConnectHome. Through this program, the government is working with service providers such as Google Fiber to bring high-speed broadband to 275,000 low-income households across the country.
They’re ambitious, well-intentioned initiatives that will, if all goes according to plan, have a major impact on the kids and families they touch. And yet, the companies backing these efforts—including AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, and more—still earmark these programs as charity. That means they’ve set aside a finite amount of donations, and these donations have clear end dates. After that, schools will be left to figure out how to pay for the access they once received for free.
That’s where Qualcomm Education is hoping to make a difference. Instead of giving these data plans away for free, it’s pushing the industry to create a sustainable business model that might stand a chance of outliving these charitable donations. If carriers are willing to create a data plan for schools that costs around $10 a kid, then schools might actually be able to afford them. And carriers, forever motivated by their bottom lines, would have a monetary incentive to keep these projects up and running.
“The question is, when the philanthropy runs dry, is there a business here?” says Vicki Mealer-Burke, who’s leading the effort as vice president of Qualcomm Education.
In March, Qualcomm joined forces with AT&T and Samsung to test that hypothesis through a pilot program with Alvin Dunn. This fall, the company is working with another top-tier carrier (though it can’t say publicly which one) to roll the program out to two new schools. The hope is by this time next year, having worked out the kinks of the program in closed trials, they’ll be able to offer these data plans to schools across the country.
“There are a lot of initiatives that are pushing toward high-throughput WiFi in schools. We know that’s going to happen one way or another, and it’ll allow each child to have a device and access to digital curriculum,” Mealer-Burke says. “We just want to make sure all that doesn’t stop when the bell rings.”
At first glance, Qualcomm’s motivation for getting involved in education isn’t altogether obvious. After all, this is a company that makes its billions selling chipsets to device manufacturers and licensing its massive portfolio of more than 10,000 wireless technology patents. It’s not in the business of selling data plans to schools, or anyone else, for that matter.
But when you look back through the company’s history, the rationale for Qualcomm Education begins to come into focus. Founded in 1985 by a group of researchers, Qualcomm has a long trace record of testing new technologies before they’re ready for primetime. It was manufacturing cell phones in the early 1990s; it released a smartphone in 1998, and by 2001—that’s six years before Apple gave us the iPhone—Qualcomm even had an app store. “One of the first apps was a gray-scale bowling app,” remembers Mealer-Burke, who’s been with the company for nearly two decades. “It cost $7.99 a month.”
At the time, these bets seemed foolish. Today, they look remarkably prescient. Little by little, these inventions pushed mobile technology forward, enabling Qualcomm to sell more chipsets and license more patents, which, of course, transformed the company into the wireless technology giant it is today. Now, Qualcomm is working to spread this technology in schools. “Any time we get LTE into the world, it’s good for Qualcomm,” says Mealer-Burke.
This isn’t the first time Qualcomm has dabbled in education. It’s been donating connected devices to schools for years through its charitable arm, Qualcomm Reach. But it wasn’t until two years ago that the company began exploring education as an actual line of business. The thinking was, if the company could convince carriers to sell the data plans, then Qualcomm could provide the security and safety software to ensure students would only have access to school-approved content.
The company spent the next two years developing this technology, called QLearn. It allows schools to create dual personas for their students. When students are logged into School Mode, the device will work on either WiFi or LTE and will allow students to access only school-related websites and apps. When students aren’t logged into School Mode, the device will only work on WiFi. This protects schools from running afoul of regulations like the Children’s Internet Protection Act, which requires schools and libraries to block content that could be considered obscene or harmful to students. It also prevents students from driving up data costs by streaming Netflix at home all night.
With QLearn up and running, Qualcomm teamed up with AT&T and Samsung late last year, and then went looking for a school to test it. Alvin Dunn proved to be an all-too perfect fit.
Though it’s a relatively short drive from San Diego’s beachside resorts and mega-mansions, Alvin Dunn is a world away. Its students, 89 percent of whom identify as Hispanic or Latino and 65 percent of whom are English language learners, take classes in tiny modular buildings on a large stretch of concrete, interrupted by patches of parched California grass. At recess, they play on an expanse of blacktop across the street from a liquor store and Little Caesars pizza shop. In June, the school hung up a sign at the entrance advertising free meals over the summer months for the 89 percent of Alvin Dunn students who receive free and reduced-price lunches.
So perhaps it should have come as no surprise to Qualcomm—although of course, it still did—that more than half of Alvin Dunn students say that either because of a lack of device, lack of connectivity, or some combination of the two, they have no Internet access at home. “We couldn’t honestly believe it,” Mealer-Burke says. “This is San Diego.”
It stunned Jennifer Carter, too, when she became principal of Alvin Dunn three years ago after working in a much wealthier school called La Costa Meadows. There, Carter communicated with parents on a weekly email blast and pushed teachers to adopt new online tools like the math app TenMarks. “That just was not an option here,” she says of Alvin Dunn. Which is why, when the district asked Carter whether she’d be willing to work with Qualcomm on this new pilot program, she accepted on the spot.
Already, the three teachers leading the pilot say they’ve noticed a difference in the quality of students’ work and their level of engagement. “Not to be cheesy, but this has leveled the playing field for our students,” says Terrence Vitiello, one of the 6th grade teachers. “So many times, they’d go home and didn’t have connectivity, so anything we started in class—the Google Docs or one of our online programs—was just done. Now, all of a sudden, the day continues.”
Nancy Hayashi, another teacher at Alvin Dunn, says she’s noticed the biggest difference in her seven students who have learning disabilities, including one student named Melissa Rosales, who told Hayashi last year that her one wish for her 11th birthday was to be as smart as the other kids in class. “That’s the saddest thing I ever heard. Most girls dream of ponies and stuff,” Hayashi says. “Well, now, she has this device, and knowledge is easy.”
Evidence that this at-home access is actually helping kids learn is more than anecdotal. Throughout the pilot, Qualcomm has been working with a third-party education research group called Project Tomorrow to survey the students about their experience, and so far, the results are promising. Among the students who were previously affected by the homework gap, 96 percent said having at-home access made them better learners. Meanwhile, 84 percent of all the students surveyed said they were using the device to write papers and complete homework assignments at home. They reported increases in confidence and collaboration with their peers; more than half of them said home access has made them more interested in what they were learning.
For Julie Evans, the researcher behind the report, this isn’t surprising. She’s seen similar impacts in schools across the country that have given students connectivity at home. “At-home access facilitates the opportunity to be self-directed learners, and to take what they’re learning in school and extend it,” Evans says. “The idea of instilling in these students a desire for lifelong learning, and the resourcefulness to know how to go pursue that is something that transcends just learning algebra.”
Evans has also seen an increasing willingness on the part of school and district leaders to pay not only for devices, but for connectivity as well. “What used to be a ‘nice-to-have’ is now an imperative,” she says. “Whenever you have that shift from something that’s a nice to have to an imperative, the schools understand the business aspects of it.”
Carter, for one, says that even in a low-socioeconomic school like Alvin Dunn, she’d be eager to buy data plans for all of her students. “I’m opening up 7th and 8th grade in 2017, and I need to know what kind of device and what kind of connectivity I’ll be able to purchase to move them along,” she says.
All of which puts added pressure on Qualcomm to scale what it’s started at Alvin Dunn—and that may not be so easy. Evans says she’s seen dozens of promising projects that flame out after the pilot is complete. “I call it campfires of innovation,” she says. “It’s not to say other projects don’t change people’s lives. They do. But if we’re really talking about harnessing the potential of digital learning to change the trajectory of education, then we can’t be building all these campfires of innovation.”
And that, of course, will require a major carrier like AT&T, Sprint, or Verizon to take the first step toward what could be a self-cannibalizing business. “If they offer a $10 data plan to kids who are in school, what’s to stop someone else from saying, ‘I want a $10 data plan,’” Mealer-Burke says.
But there are early signs that carriers are warming to the idea. After the initial pilot with Alvin Dunn, AT&T agreed to work with the school for an additional year. According to Drew Evangelista, who leads up AT&T’s education initiatives, the company is using this time to study data usage and determine if such a low-cost data plan is economically feasible. But he says the company is actively pursuing the idea. “There’s been lots of stops, starts, projects, and pilots. Our focus is making this sustainable and available to all kids,” he says. “It shouldn’t be a heroic effort to get your homework done.”
Then, of course, there's the fact that Qualcomm—now a giant publicly traded company facing increased competition in the mobile industry—isn't quite the business it used to be, capable of trying out any old idea for the sake of pushing the industry forward. In July, Qualcomm announced it would be cutting 4,700 jobs, or 15 percent of its workforce, as it plans to reduce costs by $1.4 billion. Mealer-Burke knows she doesn't have much time to prove that this business is worth Qualcomm's time and attention. "The biggest question we ask ourselves is: Are we sure there's more than just philanthropy here? We know there has to be," she says, "but we won't be given 10 years to figure it out."
And yet, giving up on a project as important as this one would risk leaving thousands of kids on the wrong side of the digital divide—kids who, as Lopez made abundantly clear, are well worth the investment.
