According to a White House blog post from last week…

the President is announcing a bold and transformative education initiative to breathe life into the classroom of the 21st century. The goal of the President’s ConnectED initiative is to bring high-speed Internet connections to 99 percent of America’s students – which he is calling on the FCC to do within five years.

The program is three-pronged with efforts focused on better connectivity, teachers training and private-sector innovation (but mostly related to devices).

The blog post paints the picture of need…

Yet this national vision of the 21st Century classroom is impossible with the level of connectivity that most schools have today. Only 20 percent of educators feel their classrooms have the connectivity to meet their teaching needs today. In fact, the average school has about the same level of connectivity as the average home, even though the average school has 200 times more people. Thousands of schools don’t even have the bandwidth to stream two videos into their school at the same time – let alone provide the kind of opportunities that can be seen in Mooresville, where students in classroom after classroom are learning on their own individual digital devices.

The President understands that we have to take bold action if we are to offer our young people the best education in the world so they can compete for jobs in the global economy. South Korea, which tops global rankings in reading and math, already has 100 percent of schools with high-speed connectivity – and by 2016, its schools are planning on eliminating textbooks from the classroom altogether. We have to move with force and speed if we are to lead – not follow – on developing the best learning opportunities for our young people.

Unfortunately the blog post doesn’t include a lot of detail or specifics. The Connected Nation blog does draw out some specifics based on earlier government proposals…

In 2010, the National Broadband Plan established a goal of Gigabit connectivity for schools, libraries, and other Community Anchor Institutions, and earlier this year, FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel outlined her “E-Rate 2.0” proposal, which shares many of the same elements as the President’s ConnectED initiative.

Funding for the ConnectED initiative would come from the FCC’s Universal Service Fund, which currently collects and distributes approximately $8.2 billion per year in subsidies to telecommunications providers, schools, libraries, and rural healthcare centers. Of that, approximately $2.3 billion annually is spent on connectivity for schools and libraries through E-Rate. The E-Rate Fund size has barely changed since the E-Rate program was created in 1997.

ConnectED would be a significant and substantial increase in broadband capacity at schools and libraries. Today, according to an FCC Report, only 10% of E-Rate schools and libraries have broadband speeds at or above the President’s goal of 100 Mbps. In fact, 45% of schools receiving E-Rate funds access the Internet at speeds lower than 3 Mbps. Eighty percent of schools and libraries report that their current broadband needs are not served by their existing service.

While broadband has proliferated in the nation’s homes and businesses since the E-Rate was created in 1997, the E-Rate program has been slow to catch up. Sixty-four percent of E-Rate funding goes to support antiquated, traditional telephone and voice services like telephones and pagers, and only 25% is used to purchase broadband Internet connections. This distribution of funds is largely the result of existing FCC program rules written in 1997 that assign priority for certain categories of services and which cap the size of the E-Rate program overall. As a result, many school and library plans to upgrade their broadband infrastructure are delayed for lack of access to adequate funding.