Alice in InfoLand

According to Reed Hundt, former FCC chair, he once asked Bill Bennett, former Secretary of Education, to support the legislative proposal for the Telecommunications Law of 1996 that would eventually pay for internet access in all classrooms and libraries in the country. 

Bennett refused to help, because, as he told Hundt, he did not want public schools to obtain new funding, new capability, new tools for success. He wanted them, he said, to fail so that they could be replaced with vouchers,charter schools, religious schools, and other forms of private education.  Gee, nice statement from the guy being paid by the guvm’t to set policy for public schools.

Fortunately, the bill did manage to pass, and as Hundt points out in his article at the TPM cafe, "The Internet has been the first technology made available to students in poorly funded schools at about the same time and in about the same way as to students in well funded schools."