Don't Panic — Yet: What the FCC's E-Rate Review Means for Schools
The FCC is formally asking whether E-rate should continue to exist. Not whether to trim it, not whether to restructure it. Whether to end it.
The word in the proceeding is "sunsetting," which is how you say "termination" when you want to sound measured. Education policy attorney Reg Leichty, founding partner of Foresight Law + Policy and someone who has spent years working the E-rate side of this policy space, appeared on the Tech and Learning podcast this month to explain what the inquiry actually says versus what the press release says. His read: this is a serious threat dressed in careful language.
What makes the FCC's framing strange is the rationale. The review leans on concerns about student screen time. Leichty's response to that is blunt: screen time questions are worth asking, but they are outside the FCC's telecommunications mandate, and grafting them onto an infrastructure subsidy review is a category error. You do not audit the electrical grid because teenagers watch too much TV.
The practical stakes are not abstract. E-rate is need-based and scaled to poverty level, which means the districts that would get hit hardest are exactly the ones you would expect: low-income urban districts, rural districts where fiber runs long and expensive, places where the program has historically been the difference between connected and not.
If you have never filed a comment with the FCC before, this is a reasonable time to start. The proceeding is open. Leichty is explicit that district leaders and IT staff showing up in the record matters. The FCC hears from industry constantly. It hears from schools when schools decide to speak.
Thirty years of broadband infrastructure for the districts that needed help most is a lot to lose because someone conflated connectivity with TikTok.
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Tech tip of the week
Audit your Chromebook filtering policies to catch extension exploits and circumvention tools
Students figured out a long time ago that a VPN extension or a proxy tool can tunnel right past your content filter. The exploits are not sophisticated. They do not need to be. They just need to work once, on one device, before you notice.
Pull up your Google Admin console and go to Devices, then Chrome, then Apps and Extensions. Check what is actually installed across your fleet, not just what you approved. Sort by install count and look for anything that appeared recently, spreads across multiple users, or has a name vague enough to mean anything. "Helper Tool" is not a helper tool.
While you are there, verify that your extension installation policy is set to block all and allow by exception. If it is set to allow and you are managing exceptions, flip it. That single change closes most of the casual circumvention happening in your buildings right now.
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