It's time to tap the full potential of the Internet for low-income New Yorkers

It's a technology which yields dividends for education, health, employment, and community life. It's a tool for empowerment, especially for the unemployed, single parents, elderly, physically disabled, and others with limited mobility. Equality of opportunity depends on it.

Yes, it’s the telephone.

But of course the Internet is all these things as well (and much more). And a comparison of these two technologies , each revolutionary in its day , reveals much about just how far the Internet has to go to realize it’s full potential for the neediest among us.

A quarter of a century after the telephone’s invention in 1878, the technology was still a rarity in the American home. By contrast the Internet, now at a similar stage in its lifespan, has already been adopted by over 70% of the nation’s households, with many more able to connect in school and at work. But for low-income families the latest data show still less than half have access from anywhere, and as little as 30% are able to connect from home.

Our society now accepts a telephone as a basic necessity for people of all income levels. But the Internet is surely just as vital , and in fact it has the potential to dwarf Alexander Bell’s invention as a tool for low-income families. The stakes are so high that even the current comparatively rapid rate of Internet adoption is simply not fast enough.

When it comes to the question of where low-income families should be able to connect, one option stands above all the rest: the home. Many users naturally aren’t comfortable looking up information on sensitive personal finance or health issues at public terminals. And as any parent knows, sometimes the only chance to go online is late at night after the kids are asleep.

Middle- and upper-income New Yorkers are dropping home dial-up Internet service in droves in favor of broadband connections through cable modems and DSL. Shouldn’t low-income families have the same opportunity? A recent article in Business Week answered that question with a definitive “yes”, citing evidence that users with a high-speed connection, able to avoid the frustration and anxiety of waiting for 56K downloads, are five times more likely to complete a transaction on-line.

But while the price of new computers has been plummeting , even name-brand systems can now be found for around $500 , the price of broadband access, at $40 per month and up, remains a significant barrier to families living on limited incomes.

Twelve states and municipalities, ranging from California to Kentucky, have implemented an ingeniously simple solution to this problem. They now mandate or encourage that all new affordable housing be built with high-speed wiring in each apartment. Depending on the networking technology employed, this lowers the cost of broadband Internet access to just $10 per family. Installation of the wiring is paid for not by government, but by the private builders, who already receive hefty subsidies in the form of tax-credits and low-interest loans for their work, benefits which far outweigh the estimated 0.1% which installation of high-speed wiring adds to the cost of new construction. New York’s City and State housing finance agencies should quickly follow the lead of other forward-thinking states in implementing a similar policy.

But assuring that low-income families have high-speed Internet access is only half the battle , in fact, it may be less than half. We take the telephone for granted today as an essential tool for low-income people because employers, health care providers, government agencies, and retailers all long-ago reinvented their operations to adapt to this technology. In short, a telephone as a piece of hardware is only empowering because of who’s on the other end of the line (be they human or computer) and what the connection with them allows a user to accomplish.

That’s why it’s essential that the public, private, and non-profit sectors now reinvent themselves again to tap the power of the Internet as a tool for low-income families. Fully realized, the net will help low-income families to leap over social and geographic barriers. The possibilities are almost endless, and to date we’ve only barely scratched the surface.

Typical of government websites today, New York City’s NYC.gov offers transactional capabilities for homeowners, small businesses, and landlords , but provides little more than the equivalent of on-line brochures for services tailored to low-income residents. A few other localities, however, have pointed the way forward: The City of Portland allows residents to search on-line for home-based childcare providers in their neighborhood, a web-based solution which is now getting more use than the City’s old off-line information service. And the State of Kentucky offers an on-line tool to allow low-income residents to connect to available subsidized housing options in any county of the state.

These and many other innovative resources are part of a website called The Beehive, which offers a vast array of tools and information designed to help empower low-income families (the site is produced by the non-profit organization I work for, One Economy). The Beehive also offers multi-lingual on-line training in financial literacy, health issues, immigration matters, and much more.

Like government, private industry has far to go in opening its doors to low-income users on-line. But here again a few innovators point the way. Sylvan Learning Systems, whose core business is remedial and enrichment training for students K-12, has launched an on-line version of its tutoring program called eSylvan. In New York and several other cities the company is making a concerted effort to enroll low-income students in the on-line program, allowing them to overcome the barriers of long trips to bricks-and-mortal Sylvan centers in wealthier areas.

Surveys of low-income adults show their greatest interest in going on-line is not to use chat rooms or download music , it’s to look for a job. And online job directories are only the beginning. Web-based workforce development has the potential to help low-income users choose a career, prepare for a job interview, create a resume, and more. The Chicago-based non-profit Women Employed has developed an on-line career coach which leads the way in this area. New Yorkers deserve the same.

Indeed it may be as a tool for promoting employment that on-line access proves most indispensable for the poor. If so, the I-Internet would only be following the path of the telephone, which in 1987 was ruled by the Montana Supreme Court to be a necessity for gaining employment. A similar court ruling today on the Internet may be unlikely, but our city would be wise to nonetheless recognize this medium as an indispensable tool for low-income New Yorkers. And we should move rapidly to tap its full transformative potential.

Time to stand up for our schools

If you want to understand last month’s historic court decision to mandate billions of dollars in additional state funding for New York City schools, all you need to know is a few basic facts:

* The average 8th grade class in NYC has 27 students, compared to an average of 22 students in the rest of the state.

* The median teacher salary in New York City is $1,500 less than in the rest of the state.

* Our city’s schools have half as many library books per student as schools in the rest of the state.

Larger classes, lower salaries, fewer supplies. How can this be? The answer is simple: the state provides less funding per pupil to the children of New York City than it does to children elsewhere.

If you think this amounts to a profound injustice, you are right. And thankfully New York’s courts have agreed. After a 12-year effort by the non-profit Campaign for Fiscal Equity (founded by our own Councilmember Robert Jackson), this past Valentine’s Day the courts ordered the State to provide an additional $5.6 BILLION per year in annual funding to city schools, plus an addition $9.6 BILLION in long-term spending for construction and improvement of school buildings. Additional resources of this magnitude would bring about dramatic, unprecedented improvements in our schools, allowing for the smaller classes, modern facilities, well-paid teachers, and adequate supplies which our children so desperately need and deserve.

But before you cheer too loudly, there is bad news. Gov. Pataki and his Republican allies in Albany have vowed to use every tactic at their disposal to block the court order from becoming a reality. Blatantly disregarding the interests of the state’s neediest children, Pataki has already announced his intention to appeal the ruling. This virtually assures that no action will be taken for at least a year. When asked by a reporter for the Buffalo News why he was taking such an aggressive response, Pataki displayed a stunning lack of compassion in responding simply, "I don’t know, but I’m sure my lawyers will figure something out."

Many of you have already expressed your outrage at this obstruction in Albany by visiting www.OurKidsCantWait.com, where with the click of a button you can send an email demanding action on the school funding issue from the governor and key legislative leaders. No less than 20,000 New Yorkers have already sent messages through the site since it was launched three weeks ago. And the site’s sponsors are making another big push now for folks to sign on as the fight in Albany heats up …so don’t miss this chance to add your name to the list.

Pataki, unfortunately, shows no sign of relenting, and education activists are now taking the fight to the State legislature, in hopes that it will end this crisis once and for all by issuing a budget modification which would create a new, more just state-wide education funding formula. But the leaders of the Republican-controlled State Senate are proving to be just as indifferent to the needs of New York City schools as the governor has been.

To counter this threat the Alliance for Quality Education (AQE) has launched a campaign to pressure the obstructionist Senate Republicans where they are most vulnerable. AQE is leading phone banks to call into the districts of local Republican state senators whose seats are particularly vulnerable to Democrats. If just four Republican senators can be convinced to support equitable education funding, then the legislature will pass these desperately needed measures. So far the phone banks are showing signs of having a powerful impact. But AQE needs more volunteers, so if you can help I urge you to reach out to April Humphrey at (718) 222-1089 or aphumphrey@aqeny.org. (Phone banking is going on Monday and Wednesday evenings at 330 W. 42nd St.)

The stakes in this fight in incalculably high. Nothing less than the rights of 1.1 million children to a decent education hangs in the balance. All of us need to act now to make sure our leaders do not let this moment pass.