Forcing a decision between investing in technology or`putting a new roof on the schoolhouse is a "false choice," according to Larry Irving, administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). In the following interview with Educom Review, Irving says we've got to do both.
Educom Review: Let's start on a personal note, if we may. We know you went to Northwestern University and to Stanford Law. Fill in the rest.
Irving: I went off to college at Northwestern when I was 17, after attending public schools in New York City - in fact, P.S. 118, Junior High 67, and Springfield Garden High School. I am very proud of being a graduate of public schools. I think that it's important for kids in public schools to know that public schools produce people who can grow up to do things that they may not think they can do. They need someone to demonstrate that you can be a graduate of a public school in a major city, you can come from a working class family, and you can grow up to be an Assistant Secretary. There are not many places in the world where that can happen, but it can still happen to kids in this country. And one reason I am so focused on getting technology in schools - and particularly schools in inner cities and rural communities and underserved communities - is that I want those kids to have the same chance I had. Outside of my family and my community, it was really public schools and public libraries that gave me my background. I spent a lot of time in public libraries, and I had teachers at every level who were supportive and made sure that I had the requisite foundation to do everything I could with whatever God-given talents I had.
ER: Do you know whether those same schools that you went to in New York are as good now as they were then?
Irving: I know that there are still students who come out of those schools that do well. I don't think as many students do well. One of the things that I am disturbed to learn is that none of the three schools that I graduated from in New York City is connected to the Net. And so I go around the country talking about my wonderful public school education and the skills I learned and how I was as qualified when I got to Northwestern and Stanford as any other student in the country because of my background in New York City public schools - yet the kids who are coming through those same schools now won't be as well-prepared because we haven't been able to get enough technology into the schools. I mean, I knew how to use the slide rule, I knew how the use the compass, I knew how to use the protractor, I knew how to use the typewriter because of my public school education. Those were the skills needed at the time. The kids coming up today aren't getting the requisite computer skills they need for the next century, aren't getting the Net-surfing skills that other kids around the country are getting. So when they get to college, they may not have the same foundation and have the same opportunities.
ER: Just how important do you think Internet access for school children is? In the range of things that could be done for education and for the schools, is that the most important thing to be done?
Irving: I don't know if it is the most important thing, but I think people are making false choices. People are talking about it as if it were a choice of fixing school roofs or providing Internet access; a choice of decreasing the size of classrooms or providing Internet access. They are talking about Internet access as something separate and apart. We've got to rethink our schools in fundamental ways. But one of the things we have to think about when we are thinking about schools is technology. Technology is going to be central to the new mission of schools in our country. Study after study is beginning to demonstrate that students who use technology learn better and learn differently from kids who don't. Study after study is showing that there is a demand for skilled workers in this country, for employees who understand how computers work. Whether you are driving a truck, or are a police officer, or are an engineer, you need computer skills. We have to train our children for the jobs they are going to be walking into when they get out of school.
And I hate it when people say: "You either have to fix the roof or you have to put in computers." No, you have to do both. These children need and deserve the best we can give them. This is the richest country that has ever existed on the planet Earth. We have more technological capabilities than any country has ever had. We can afford to find a way to make sure that our children have computer skills and Internet skills and that we use technology to improve education. And it's important for every kid in this country, not just some kids in this country. What I worry about is what happens to the class of 2008. Two kids going to school in the year 1996, and one kid is in a school all 12 years where he or she is learning how to use computers, is utilizing technology, has pen pals in Spain, has pen pals in Japan, is getting distance learning in physics from MIT. And another kid is going to a school that has no technology and is learning the way kids were learning in 1971, when I got out of high school. There is no doubt in my mind that the kid who is learning with technology, who has more choices and more options, is going to be better prepared for society, better prepared for jobs, better prepared for college. And that shouldn't be. That's not what America is about.
America is about every child being able to produce at his or her level of capability, not every child being circumscribed by the circumstance of his or her birth. And that's what it comes down to. I was as prepared, and most of my friends were as prepared, as any of the kids they went to college with. Because society made an investment. You didn't have to have a huge library in your home. You didn't have to have parents who had Ph.D. degrees to get a good education in this country. And it shouldn't be that only kids who are born into a middle-class community, or communities with a tax base high enough to have technology, get an education that's a world class education. Every child in this country should.
ER: Do you think that the concept of "universal service," which is associated with ordinary telephone service, has to be broadened to include new technologies?
Irving: Yes. That's a perfectly natural development. We made a decision as a country, 60 years ago, with the Communications Act of 1934, that we were going to try to do the best we could to deploy telephone technology to every household in this country. And we constantly raised the bar. At one point, it was just having a party line. At another point, it was having a dial tone. At another point it was having touch-tone. We keep raising the bar with what universal service means, and before long it will need to be raised again, though the particular level still needs to be determined.
Will raising the bar mean that you are going to get data and voice and graphics from an online provider of some sort - the telephone company or a wireless company or an Internet service provider? Getting you access to what the Net offers is increasingly going to become part of what universal service means in a residential context. As a result of last year's Telecommunications Act, we also look at technology in terms of getting it to the community and to community-based organizations and to community access centers such as libraries or community centers or schools. The reality is, the economy of this world is such that not everybody in this country is going to have a PC or a WebTV or an NC or some other information appliance in their home in the near term. But everyone should have it somewhere in their community so that if they want to have access to it, they can go there. Universal service hasn't meant that everybody had to have a phone in their home, it just meant that as a policy we wanted all people to be able to afford a phone at home.
ER: And how will that principle apply to the Internet?
Irving: I think we want to do the same thing with Internet technology and information technology over the long haul, but in the short run we want to make sure that there is at least somewhere in the community you can go to get access to the Net and pick up your e-mail, whether from a library or a senior center or some other kind of community center.
ER: You seem to have a real sense of urgency about this.
Irving: I do. One of the things that people forget is that this technology is going to change the way we live and particularly, work. If you are 40 years old and your job changes because of the technology, you've still got probably 25 useful years as a worker in this society. If you own a small business, and you have a 10 or 15 or 20 percent margin, if somebody else has the technology and can push their margin to 30 or 40 percent, they can put you out of business. If you are a farmer, things like precision farming are going to spell the difference between whether you can stay in business or not. So it is important to get this technology spread throughout all our communities, because people need to know more and more about it if they're going to survive in the 21st Century.
ER: Contrast the role of government and private enterprise in regard to achieving these goals.
Irving: I think the main role of private enterprise is to keep driving the technology, to make investments in the technology, and to figure out how to use the technology. The role of government is to develop the regulatory structure that provides certainty so that investments can be made, and also to ensure that the benefits of the technology are fairly allocated across the economy and the population. And I think government needs to make sure that people are educated in technology, needs to have policies that promote universal service, needs to make sure that children are protected from the prurient things that are in cyberspace - using the least intrusive methods possible, but giving parents some certainty that their child is not going to be wandering into the red-light areas. Vice President Gore and President Clinton have described it as: government should be steering, not rowing. The hard work of rowing is done by industry, and government just tries to make sure that we aren't cast upon the shoal.
ER: Have you been surprised by any technological changes since you took office?
Irving: When I came into this job in 1993, I wasn't much of a Netizen and hadn't been on the Net very much. And you couldn't have convinced me in '93 that you were going to see Mosaic become as important as it became that year and Netscape become as important as it did in 1994. And what we are beginning to see a lot more of now is Internet audio and Internet video that are more and more robust, and an Internet that's got a lot more capacity and is much more of an international phenomenon than it was just two or three years ago. The growth rates in Asia and Europe and Africa and Latin America are beginning to approximate the growth rate in the United States in '93 and '94. Nobody could have foreseen any of those things just a few years ago. The thing for government is not to try to predict but to try to set up a course that allows this thing to evolve the way it needs to evolve.
ER: How much success do you feel that you've had?
Irving: I think we've had great success - in terms of people knowing things they didn't know before. You watch television ads and you see http://www everywhere. There's a vocabulary; there's an expectation; there's an experience; there's a desire to learn more. There are investments going on, and our economy is stronger because of it. Schools are engaged, and Net Day has been a tremendous success. And now libraries want to be a part of Net Day. Museums want to be part of Net Day. Everybody wants to be connected - and for the right reasons. We're beginning to see this technology used to prolong lives, help cut down on hospital visits, help consumers make informed choices when they are shopping. We are seeing so many wonderful things happening as a result of this. People use it as a part of their day-to-day life. And that's incredibly important.
And, you know, we've been driving a lot of that. The National Information Infrastructure Agenda for Action that the President and Vice President and Secretary Brown put out in 1993 helped us formulate some principles that have been pretty widely accepted as fundamental principles for developing any information infrastructure. Then we put forth the Global Information Infrastructure Agenda for Cooperation. We shared our views with the rest of the world. Since then we've had a G7 Conference. We've had a global conference in South Africa on the information society in developing countries. And in each instance what we've said is: here's what we think we want to be, let's engage in a dialog, and as you raise the education level, you see wonderful things happening. And that is one of the things that I really try to get industry to focus on - the need to educate policy makers, whether they are state and local government officials or domestic officials or international officials. Show them what you are doing. There are people who are regulators who think that they can regulate the Net, until you show them what video is available on the Net and what audio is available on the Net and how quickly it is all changing, and then they begin to realize: I don't even know what this is, so how am I going to regulate it? And you need for them to understand that.
ER: Well, we've talked about successes. Have you had any failures?
Irving: I think there are always some failures. I think one of the things I wish I had been able to do a little bit more - and this is just a personal failure - I don't think I've done as much as I would have liked to with some of these underserved communities. I think that there are still pockets of America that don't have the same base of knowledge about what this technology can do and will do. And I'm particularly worried about low-income communities, and some ethnic minority communities, and some rural communities. We've done a lot to reach out to those communities, but we need to do more. I am worried about what is happening in Net Day. I don't want Net Day to become just a middle-class phenomenon. You can't stop people from progressing just because you're afraid someone else is going to be further behind, but you've also got to help the person that's behind to catch up. You have to make the message loud and clear that everybody has to participate in this; everybody has to be a beneficiary of this technology.
I do think one of the things we're getting increasingly better at is to stop talking about technology, and start talking about the benefits to people. When people first started talking about the Internet, they were talking about lights and bells and whistles and software; since then, I think we've gotten smarter, and have learned that the latest gizmo doesn't matter very much in and of itself, but only to the extent and manner in which it affects people's lives. So I think the focus has become: how does this affect real people? Not plastic, not silicon, not fiber-optics - it's about people.
ER: And so how do you decide whether the technology is doing its job?
Irving: By looking at the end result. With regard to education, if a kid's grades are not going up, it doesn't matter if he's sitting in front of a television, sitting in front of a computer, or reading a book. I only want that kid in front of a computer if he or she is actually getting better educated by using that computer, getting more information. With regard to medicine, if we are not saving lives by using distance medicine, if going to a doctor in person is a better way of doing medicine than distance medicine, then you don't need to invest money in an infrastructure. So I think the focus has shifted to: how does this affect real people? And that's the right focus. For too long, the technology was always presented in techno-jargon coming forth from scientists and alpha-geeks and the engineers, but increasingly it is now being driven by people, by what real people need everyday in their lives. And I think that's a success.
ER: Can you cite evidence for that?
Irving: Mainly anecdotal evidence, such as the fact that you see more and more regular people, who are not technologists, calling and writing and visiting and investing and becoming knowledgeable about these technologies. We've gone from whatever number were on the Net in the United States four years ago to 35 million people now. I mean, everybody is using e-mail, and virtually everybody knows how to surf the Net. Most professionals know what the Net is, and most schools and libraries want access to it. And these are not people who were early adopters, the technologists. It's becoming a way of life in the way that a radio or television became a way of life. You know, in the '20s and '30s radios became ubiquitous and in the '40s and '50s TVs became ubiquitous. It was weird for my parents and your parents to see a moving signal on TV. The first televised night game in baseball, in the late '40s, was a weird thing. People didn't expect to be able to see Jackie Robinson and Mickey Mantle and Roy Campanella in the World Series. The average household didn't see the "shot heard round the world" when Ralph Branca got taken out of the park by Bobby Thompson. Television was something new and people had to get adjusted to it, but it became a part of the national fabric, and the same thing is happening with the Internet. The speed of change can be incredible. I was reading something in TV Guide quoting some producer as saying, "Well, we know this one show is strong at 8:00, but our show comes on at 8:30, and we know that everybody in America has a remote control." Do you know how long ago it was that nobody in America had a remote control? Just 10 years ago, you got up and moved across to the TV and turned the dial. Things happen very quickly and become a fundamental part of who we are as people.
ER: What thought would you like to leave us with?
Irving: With the fact that not everybody in our country has a remote control yet and not everybody has access to the Net. You have to constantly remind yourself of that. This is a global phenomenon, and America has a unique opportunity to do well and do good, and it's important to consider a couple of things. Ninety percent of the world's households don't have computers. Eighty percent of the world's households don't have telephones. Fifty percent of the people alive on this planet have never used a telephone, and fifty percent of the people on this planet live two hours or more travel time from the nearest telephone.
There's a tremendous opportunity because what we are doing in this country is to change those numbers, to help people do better in a global context, and to do well and create jobs and wealth and opportunity in this country at the same time. And telecommunications is basically going to be an economic driver as well as a societal driver. In addition to improving education, improving health care, improving access to information - by driving technologies out, by lowering costs, by U.S. companies staying ahead of the curve - we are going to create jobs and opportunities here, we are going to create knowledge and provide better health care, and provide better communications opportunities to other people around the world. This is a good thing. There are only a few times in your life that you can work on something that is a win-win situation. This is one of them.
In addition to his duties at the NTIA, Larry Irving is the assistant secretary for communications and information. He is a principal advisor to the president, vice president and secretary of commerce on telecommunications and information issues, and manages the Federal government's use of the spectrum.
During the past three years, Irving played a key role in representing the administration to secure passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. From 1987 to 1993, Irving was the senior counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance. His early career included serving as legislative director and counsel to the late congressman Mickey Leland (D-Texas), and a stint with a Washington, D.C., law firm.