When Amy Olsen wants to have a video chat with her family, she has to drive four miles to the parking lot of the Lowell, Vermont, town clerk to use the free Wi-Fi.

None of Lowell’s 879 or so residents have access to direct broadband service, according to BroadbandNow, a company that helps people find and compare internet service providers. The closest anyone there can get is “fixed wireless,” which uses outdoor directional antennas to broadcast radio signals to residential Wi-Fi gateways. But for that, you need to live close enough to an antenna. Ms. Olsen doesn’t.

Instead she uses a sluggish satellite connection, which is fine for sending email and downloading web pages, but not for much else. Video, she says, is “slow and bouncy.”

Ms. Olsen is far from alone. As endless social media feeds and YouTube videos emphasize that “We’re all in this together,” a huge swath of the population is finding itself digitally erased from the conversation. Some 42 million Americans, and a quarter of all rural residents, lack access to broadband, according to a February 2020 report from BroadbandNow. Even among those who live in places where broadband is offered, for many, it remains out of reach: Just 41% of households with incomes below $20,000 have broadband at home.

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As the coronavirus pandemic forces Americans out of their workplaces, classrooms, and social spaces, and into their homes, the internet has become, for many, the only link to society. Amid a steady stream of news stories about teleconferencing, remote learning, and Netflix binging, those without reliable online access are finding themselves shut out. 

“When you’re online and most of your people are online, it feels like we’re all online,” says Jessamyn West, a Vermont librarian who teaches people how to use computers. “But the whole world is bigger than what’s on the internet.”

On Monday, a bipartisan quartet of lawmakers urged Congress to include dedicated broadband funding for students and low-income families in the fourth coronavirus response package. In a letter to congressional leaders, two Republicans, Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota and Rep. Roger Marshall of Kansas, and two Democrats, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Rep. Peter Welch of Vermont, wrote that, absent legislation, “small providers may be unable to continue to help ensure that the communities they serve can access distance learning and telehealth services.”

A vicious cycle

Several studies have demonstrated a strong link between broadband access and economic prosperity. An analysis conducted by Microsoft published last April found that U.S. counties with the highest unemployment also had the lowest broadband usage.

“Low-income areas tend to be more rural,” says Tyler Cooper, BroadbandNow’s editor-in-chief. “That creates sort of a vicious cycle.”

Keith Srakocic/AP

Workers install fiber-optic high-speed internet cable, March 28, 2020, in East Palestine, Ohio. The workers said the installation is a continuation of scheduled work that started before the current COVID-19 outbreak.

Municipal broadband initiatives, however, can help turn this vicious cycle into a virtuous one. Mr. Cooper cites Chattanooga, Tennessee, where, in 2010, the city’s Electric Power Board began offering fiber-optic connections to all residents. Today, the city boasts download speeds of 1 gigabit per second, about 40 times the national average. 

“Ten years ago, that town was kind of a ghost town,” says Mr. Cooper. “When this network came into play, all of a sudden you had these really attractive prospects for companies.”

Within five years, Chattanooga, whose population stands at about 180,000, had generated between 2,800 and 5,200 new jobs, according to a study by the utility, and its lightning-fast broadband speeds had earned it a new nickname: “Gig City.”

Of course, having the option of purchasing high-speed internet is only part of the puzzle. You also need to be able to afford it. A recent study by the U.K. internet comparison site Cable found that prices in the United States, the country that created the internet, ranked 119th out of 195 nations, with an average internet package costing $67.69 a month. The same package in Mexico, by comparison, costs $33.15, and in Canada it costs $34.86.

The result is a sharp divide along racial and class lines over who has broadband; one that, like all such divides, is becoming starker as the pandemic lockdown wears on. According to a 2015 Pew report, just 54% of black Americans and 50% of Hispanic residents have broadband at home, compared with 72% of their white counterparts. According to the report, more Americans are relying on their smartphones to get online, which works fine for consuming content, but is difficult for, say, composing a résumé.

“We’re all participating in this mass experiment. We’re shifting large amounts of our economy into this online world,” says Mr. Cooper. “Without a doubt this crisis will show us pretty definitively the importance of broadband in the home.”

Meg Kinnard/AP

Wi-Fi-enabled school buses – like this one seen at an apartment complex in Winnsboro, South Carolina, on March 27, 2020 – are being sent to rural and lower-income areas around South Carolina to help homebound students with distance learning.

Prerequisite for modern life?

America’s digital divide is not just about access to technology, says Ms. West, but what she calls “digital readiness,” which she defines as “the combination of skills, but also trust plus willingness” to use technology.

“It’s not just, can you click a button?” she says. “It’s, do you understand how the systems work so that you can use the tools?”

“The skills are one set of things you teach people,” says Ms. West. “But even if somebody told you how to do copy and paste, if you don’t know how to evaluate a website, or you don’t know how to go through all the hurdles of putting your credit card online, you’re in a not-as-ready position to do the things you need to do.”

For students, the sudden shift to online learning can widen this gap. Now, some students are having their education streamed to them on home computers in their parents’ home offices, while others are making do with their phones in crowded apartments. 

“Education was in some ways the great leveler for a universal basic level of study,” says Ms. West. “Everyone gets a clean bathroom and a meal they can afford and an education that is geared more or less toward everybody.”

For Ms. Olsen, a librarian at the Lanpher Memorial Library in Hyde Park, Vermont, and the president of the Vermont Library Association, her lack of reliable internet access forced her family to make a wrenching choice: Her two children, students at the University of Vermont in Burlington, are spending the lockdown not back at home, but with friends who have broadband.

“It was a hard decision,” she says. “I can call, but I can’t see their faces.”

As the lockdown drags on, a number of internet service providers are attempting to ensure access. Comcast, for instance, has agreed not to disconnect anyone’s service or charge late fees. Along with Charter Communications, the company has agreed to open free Wi-Fi hotspots across the country. Comcast, Charter, and Spectrum are also offering free trial periods of 60 or 90 days to low-income households. And, around the country, many school districts are repurposing their buses as mobile Wi-Fi hotspots, to help ensure that their students stay connected.

“It’s encouraging to see ISPs rising to the occasion,” says Mr. Cooper. “The internet is no longer a luxury. It’s really a prerequisite for participating in modern life.”

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Kathy Willens/AP

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, standing beside Rear Adm. John B. Mustin, holds a news conference as the naval hospital ship USNS Comfort arrives in New York, March 30, 2020.

It’s the most basic of political questions, but COVID-19 is now moving it from the philosophy classroom into nearly every corner of every country on Earth: What is government for?

And the answer where it most matters – among citizens, among the governed – seems to be changing dramatically, at least in places  feeling the worst effects of the virus. There, the immediate task of government has become acutely clear: Protect us and our loved ones, and give us the information, policies, tools, and care for that to happen.

That’s also part of a more fundamental change, at a time when trust in all established institutions had been eroding. Suddenly, there seems to be a renewed sense that government actually matters – that there are some things only governments can do. And, in crisis, things that governments must do.

There’s another, related change: Despite the reach of the internet in amplifying conspiracy theories and competing versions of events, we’re seeing a rekindled respect, and a need, for expertise and trustworthy research. For facts.

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Whether, of course, such changes will prove enduring, once the worst of the crisis has finally passed, will take many months to answer. But the unfamiliar demands on governments and leaders are immediate.

They’re being felt with particular urgency because they’re not coming only from lobbyists or think tanks. They’re from nurses and emergency workers, imploring those in charge to get them protective gear. From captains or passengers on ships where the virus has struck, pleading for a place to dock. From men and women, old and young, wanting assurances they’ll have the food, supplies, and care they need, often suddenly finding themselves without the week-to-week funds to afford them.

Even in some developed countries – where most of the cases, or at least those publicly acknowledged, are so far occurring – that’s forcing a rethink. For Britain’s ruling Conservatives, and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition government in Germany, tight-pursed fiscal prudence has long been a political article of faith. Yet within days of the first, stark economic impact of the COVID-19 crisis, both countries announced huge aid and stimulus packages, with the promise of more to come.

Markus Schreiber/Reuters

German Chancellor Angela Merkel talks about measures taken by the government to stop further spread of COVID-19 during a briefing at the chancellery in Berlin, April 6, 2020.

Similar fiscal responses are now in place or on the way in nearly all countries where citizens are feeling the impact of shutdowns of economic activity.

But however costly, in political terms, that’s often proving the easiest adjustment for the people in power.

A cry for ‘going big’

Elected leaders championing “small government,” for instance, are facing a crisis that is prompting demands for the opposite. U.S. President Donald Trump, in recent days, has been visibly struggling to square that circle. On the one hand, he has repeatedly portrayed the crisis as ultimately the responsibility of state and local leaders. But sky-high poll ratings for many state governors on the front line, in New York or Michigan, Washington or Ohio, have left no doubt of the grassroots hunger for assertive, effective, honest, and straightforward government action.

The president’s overall take on who is responsible is showing little sign of changing. Yet he did announce on Friday a federal government arrangement that he said would guarantee that no American, even the millions of uninsured, will have to pay if hospitalized with COVID-19. 

As not just a small-government leader, but a populist who has been sometimes almost flamboyantly dismissive of science, President Trump has also made another adjustment: deferring, on at least some major calls, to the scientific experts in his coronavirus task force.

Authoritarian regimes are faced with a different challenge. They do believe in strong central government, with pretty much everything ultimately subject to central control. But the impact of COVID-19 – an adversary they cannot defeat by force, much less by decree – is being felt no less by their citizens than those in democratic countries. The human response, the instinctive list of things they want from their rulers, has been much the same: Protect us; give us the information and tools and care we need. 

Even in China – which, after initially hiding the outbreak, took draconian measures to bring it under control – there has been extraordinary public criticism of the early failings on the country’s tightly controlled social media.

In other authoritarian countries like Russia and Egypt, and even in India, a democracy, but one led by strongman populist Narendra Modi, the full impact of having to answer to the changing public mood is only now beginning to hit.

All three of those countries seem likely to struggle with an inexorably widening number of cases – India and Egypt, in particular, both with huge populations, many areas of economic deprivation, and a patchy healthcare system. All three have recently imposed restraints on movement and economic activity.

But in a measure of their nervousness about what may be coming, and whether they’ll be able to meet ordinary citizens’ needs and expectations, all of these nation’s rulers have something else in common. In recent days, they have moved to rein in or even punish  independent reporting or comment on the scale of the outbreak.

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When Minhal Hasan and Kritika Gupta got married last month, it wasn’t what they’d pictured.

The couple, who both work for a production company in Delhi, planned on bringing all their family and friends and co-workers together for a grand celebration with hundreds of people, spread out over two days. Instead, a week before the March 20 ceremony, they were sending frantic texts and emails to disinvite their guests, and wound up hosting a pared-down lunch for 20 in their home. There was no hugging or touching. Sanitizer was handed out to each guest. Their wedding costumes went to waste.

“We had to improvise our wedding and ended up having a good time. But after this is over, we will celebrate with everyone,” says Mr. Hasan.

Indian weddings, known for being long-drawn-out and extravagant, are just the latest casualty of the coronavirus outbreak, which has halted all forms of community life. Since March 24, when the government announced a 21-day lockdown, Indians have experienced everyday life in a way that is completely at odds with what they are used to. Noisy streets have become eerily quiet, overcrowded buses and trains have stopped running, bustling markets have shut down, politics and protests have been suspended, and the collective hubbub of conversation has died out. Hundreds of millions of workers are confronting severe challenges to make ends meet. 

All around the world, people are attempting to keep interactions to a minimum. But the idea of social distancing comes with added challenges here, where, for many, it is not just a physical impossibility, but incompatible with their identity – a culture where interdependence within families and communities is both useful and prized. Some 60% of rural Indian households, and 30% of urban ones, are multigenerational, according to a report by the Intergenerational Longevity Centre.

Adnan Abidi/Reuters

A guest takes a selfie at a wedding ceremony amid an outbreak of the novel coronavirus in New Delhi, March 21, 2020.

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There is no word for “social distancing” in most Indian languages. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the nation to announce the lockdown, he spoke in Hindi, but had to borrow the term from English.

“The idea of self-isolation is a difficult one for Indians to grasp or implement,” says social commentator, columnist, and author Santosh Desai. “There is a compulsive need in us to gather energy from the collective; we find comfort in it. Being an individual is a daunting task, and in India where we’ve always had large families, it leads to a lot of anxiety.”

It’s no coincidence, he points out, that two of the greatest Indian epics, “Ramayana” and “Mahabharata,” are about the pain of exile, as the central characters are separated and eventually reunited with their social groups. In fact, as soon as the lockdown began, the state broadcaster said it would rerun hugely popular series from the 1980s and ’90s based on the two epics – announced with the hashtag #IndiaFightsCorona.

A challenge – and a strength

One day into the lockdown, Shweta Keerthi Sethia, an event planner in Delhi, got on a Zoom video call with her family in the city of Hyderabad, nearly 1,000 miles away. It was Ugadi, a harvest festival of southern India. 

Typically, extended family and friends gather to pray and have an elaborate meal with dishes made of mango to signal the arrival of summer. Preparation begins days in advance as new clothes are bought, homes are decorated with mango leaves, and visitors keep dropping in, but not this time. “It was so low-key. I can’t ever remember it being like this,” Ms. Keerthi Sethia says. 

Indians, already the biggest users of WhatsApp in the world, are moving their communication to Zoom, now the most downloaded app in the country. But they’re still managing to connect in real life, too. 

Like citizens of all cities in these unusual times, Indians have been congregating and connecting on balconies, windows, and rooftops. Millions came out to clap and clang their kitchenware on March 22 to express gratitude for essential service providers. In one Delhi neighborhood, residents played the popular Bingo-like game tambola across balconies, and in the western city of Ahmedabad, the festival of Chaitra Navratri had people dancing the garba folk dance on balconies. It helps that Indian neighborhoods are dense and packed; even those who can afford privacy often prefer to live in houses where they can interact with their neighbors, in the spirit of communal living. 

Bikas Das/AP

An Indian family play football on the roof of their apartment during a countrywide lockdown to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus in Kolkata, India, April 2, 2020.

“Public life in India is an extension of family life, a spillover in a way, and public spaces reflect this,” says Gautam Bhatia, an architect and critic.

Identity in India is derived from the collective, especially the Indian family, large and overbearing, the stuff of legend. “If there is one ‘ism’ that governs Indian society and its institutions, it is family-ism,” Indian psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar and anthropologist Katharina Kakar wrote in their book “The Indians: Portrait of a People.” Indian culture embraces the pain that can accompany too much closeness, they note. 

Some of that is a matter of survival, as people rely on extended families, neighbors, and religious communities in the absence of other institutions, says Anuja Agrawal, who teaches sociology at Delhi School of Economics. 

In some ways, those norms may help us cope with being locked in with our families, testing our most intimate relationships. But although shared spaces are part of the Indian ethos, this has changed with time and the rise of the middle class. 

“In our everyday spaces, we increasingly vacillate between togetherness and retreat,” says Radhika Chopra, a professor of sociology at Delhi University. Many of her students live by themselves, which would have been inconceivable a generation ago, she says. 

Social distancing is not as alien to the Indian imagination as we might think, she argues. For example, “Through the concepts of purity and pollution, which are intrinsic to Hinduism, we have been practicing social distancing for people from a different caste, class, and even gender,” she says, referring to the untouchability practice and the tradition of menstruating women being isolated. 

So will the pandemic accelerate social change? Will long weeks of quarantine lead to a greater need for isolation – for those who can afford it – or foster even greater interdependence? One thing is certain: The streets will be crowded again.  

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Andree Kehn/Sun Journal/AP/File

Graduates march into the Leavitt Area High School graduation at the Colisee in Lewiston, Maine, June 9, 2019. A few states are looking beyond graduation rates to assess how much value high schools add, and to give credit to educators who are meeting the needs of students facing bigger barriers.

The high school graduation rate has been rising for at least a decade. But the bar for preparing for the future has been rising alongside it – so what students do after they graduate is becoming ever more relevant to K-12 education leaders. A few states are leading the way in attempting to measure how well high schools set up their students for college and workplace success.

Louisiana, for example, recently commissioned a set of “promotion power” measures to show how much each public high school contributes to boosting its students’ likelihood of college enrollment, college persistence, and better earnings. It controls for background factors such as student poverty, so it can spotlight the schools that are propelling young people beyond statistical predictions.

Students at a high school near the top of the promotion power index are 13 percentage points more likely to go on to college than students at an average promotion power school. And by age 26, they earn nearly $6,000 more per year.

SOURCE:

Mathematica

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Karen Norris/Staff

“The magnitude of the differences was somewhat surprising,” says Matthew Johnson, an associate director at the research firm Mathematica who oversaw development of the measures. “It really does matter a lot what high school you attend for your longer-term outcomes.”

The goal is to assess high school quality more fairly, to see how much value schools add, and to give credit to educators who are meeting the needs of students facing bigger barriers.

“A lot of schools serving disadvantaged kids are actually doing great things. These kinds of approaches can really highlight … strong outcomes that close equity gaps,” says Morgan Polikoff, an associate professor at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education.

These measures also continue the trend away from the era of the federal No Child Left Behind law, which many educators criticized for relying too heavily on test scores. Now, under the Every Student Succeeds Act, states have more flexibility to look at an array of metrics to hold schools accountable for improvement.

The new approach isn’t necessarily expected to figure into formal accountability anytime soon, but “this kind of thinking is very much the model for the next few years … in states that are serious about reform,” Professor Polikoff says.

One example: Louisiana

Louisiana education leaders are already seeing some of their high schools differently in light of the promotion power measures.

For example, a high school rated “C” under the accountability system turned up in the 98th percentile statewide in terms of promoting student earnings at age 26.

“That school may not be traditionally noticed for positive work, but promotion power highlights that this high school may actually be significantly contributing to their students’ long-term outcomes,” writes Jessica Baghian, one of the state’s assistant superintendents, in an email to the Monitor.

In every promotion power category, some “C” high schools have risen to the top, she notes.

Kentucky, Massachusetts, and Virginia are also identifying “high-flyer” schools that achieve better outcomes for students from historically underserved groups. A recent Urban Institute report found that in Massachusetts and Virginia, several high schools boost students’ college enrollment rate more than 15 percentage points above what would be expected. All three states have schools whose tenth-grade test scores defy the norm.

The data also surface schools in vast need of improvement. While Massachusetts is often lauded for strong K-12 education, this scale shows that some of its high schools have graduation rates 20 percentage points below what’s expected.  

College persistence and earnings data that can be compared across states is somewhat limited. But more states could join in such efforts as they consider “the knowledge, skills, and abilities that they hope their education system is building in students – in a social-justice and equity frame in some places, but also an economic-development frame,” says Theresa Anderson, co-author of the Urban Institute report on the tri-state data and the Robust and Equitable Measures to Inspire Quality Schools (REMIQS).

An opportunity to delve deeper

Value-added measures sometimes raise concerns about setting lower goals for kids with more challenging backgrounds, which would be unfair to the students. On the other hand, Professor Polikoff says, it could be seen as unfair to educators to not consider students’ backgrounds. For state policymakers, “balancing that fairness is certainly appropriate,” he says.

With that balance in mind, Ms. Baghian writes, any promotion power model would “never entirely replace actual outcome measures, which set clear and high expectations for what educators should accomplish for every student. Instead, measures like this allow us to go deeper and learn more about what is or is not working to move the needle across our system.”

Both the REMIQS and the promotion power projects plan to look more closely at the top schools. “We can learn from them,” Ms. Baghian writes, “and potentially build those best practices into our school improvement models.”

AP

Britain's Queen Elizabeth II addresses the nation from Windsor Castle April 5.

When a public crisis strikes, people often rally around a catchphrase to lift their thought. During the coronavirus outbreak, the favorite tag has been “We’re in this together.” That spirit of unity has been on display from health workers to grocery clerks to neighbors who rarely talked to each other. Anyone need a mask? Contact a local sewing circle. Run out of food? Community volunteers will arrange a delivery.

What of elected leaders? They normally operate under a system of adversarial politics, even to the point of dismissing opponents or their ideas as not even necessary. Are they now mirroring the rest of society with a similar spirit of interdependence and equality?

By and large, democracies across the world have seen political parties get behind the new rules on public safety, additional support for first responders, and rescue packages for slumped economies. Last month, for example, the U.S. Congress quickly passed an unprecedented $2.2 trillion package with near-unanimous backing. A follow-up package is in the works. In addition, the Trump administration and state governors are coordinating closely.

On Monday, President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, felt under enough pressure to set aside partisanship and talk. Their 15-minute phone call was described as warm and constructive in the sharing of ideas on dealing with COVID-19. Even if their cooperation turns out to be fleeting, it reflected a Lincolnesque moment of a “team of rivals” listening to each other for the greater good during a national crisis.

In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson – before he was hospitalized – was under pressure within his Conservative party to form a “national unity government” with opposition parties and independents. He had already consulted with unions and civil society groups on action steps. The most famous case of the United Kingdom suspending politics was the unity government under Winston Churchill during World War II.

In Israel, the virus crisis has pushed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz, the main opposition leader, to start arranging a unity government. In Ireland, the crisis is putting pressure on political parties to form a coalition government following an inconclusive election in February.

Examples like these of pride-swallowing humility may help tone down the divisiveness of politics after the COVID-19 emergency. During her speech to the British people on Sunday, Queen Elizabeth II repeatedly used words like “together,” “united” and “fellow feeling.” She also suggested that working now as one people to end the crisis will create a societywide triumph for all.

“Using the great advances of science and our instinctive compassion to heal, we will succeed, and that success will belong to every one of us,” she said. The hidden message: Politicians should work together on solving the crisis, not compete to get credit afterward. But then again, most people are already acting that way.