One measure of a successful public policy is that, eventually, people forget the problem it was designed to solve.

In 1994, only 3 percent of American classrooms had access to the Internet. Two years later, the figure had climbed to 14 percent, but policymakers were still warning about a “digital divide” that threatened to leave poorer and rural communities behind.

E-Rate was Washington’s answer. Created through the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the program offered schools and libraries deep discounts on Internet access and the wiring needed to bring it into classrooms. When the FCC approved the rules in 1997, education leaders compared the decision to the GI Bill. Al Gore likened it to wiring schools for electricity.

The politics turned almost immediately. Within a year, lawmakers were pushing to shrink or kill the program, phone companies were objecting to how it was financed, and critics were questioning whether E-Rate should pay for Internet access and internal wiring at all. Clinton went to MIT in 1998 to defend it, arguing that the country “cannot afford not to have an e-rate.”

Then the program did what it was built to do. By 2005, nearly every school in the country was connected to the Internet and 94 percent of instructional classrooms had access. One early study of California schools estimated that by 2000 the subsidy had produced 66 percent more connected classrooms than there would have been without it, the equivalent of pulling adoption forward by about four years. It found no effect on test scores, which is its own kind of point: the wiring became plumbing, not pedagogy.

Now E-Rate is back up for discussion. The FCC is asking whether the program should be narrowed or reoriented, whether internal connections should remain eligible, whether support should be concentrated in rural areas, and even whether E-Rate should continue at all. The agency is taking public comments through Oct. 13.

That has school and library groups mobilizing. AASA convened more than 600 people for a virtual town hall this week urging school communities to weigh in, and CoSN leaders have been making the case that connectivity now underpins far more than classroom browsing. School networks run bus routing, security cameras, HVAC systems, testing and emergency communications.

Which is the wrinkle. E-Rate is up for review at a moment when connectivity is so ubiquitous it looks like a solved problem. But the "information superhighway" policymakers wanted to bring into classrooms in the 1990s has since become the basic operating infrastructure of a school. Today's list has a reminder of what that means in practice: a Massachusetts district canceled classes this week after a cyberattack took its network down.

— Thomas

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