Give Schools a Ride on the Information Highway : Media: A PC for every student is possible if utility regulators and the industry cooperate.

The entertainment trade paper Daily Variety predicts that the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ all-day “Superhighway Summit” at UCLA on Tuesday will be “the TV industry’s answer to Yalta.”

That summit, 49 years ago, resulted in the partition of the world among the superpowers. And the analogy suggests that the information industry heavyweights like Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, Rupert Murdoch and Gerald Levin and their new partners, the telephone utilities, have something like that in mind.

Certainly the keynote speaker for the day, Vice President Al Gore, thinks so. For weeks he has been preparing and test-marketing a speech--Albert’s Epistle to the Hollywoodians--warning of a world divided by the media powers into populations of information-age “haves” and “have-nots.”

This isn’t a matter of poor children in places that can’t afford cable crying, “I want my MTV.” That type of service will certainly be priced and promoted to sell widely. What Gore, and, by the way, some officials in Sacramento, are worried about is that the good stuff, real information, will not be reaching kids.

The vice president is lately fond of quoting the new head of the Federal Communications Commission, Reed E. Hundt, who said, “There are thousands of buildings in the country with millions of people in them who have no telephones, no cable television and no reasonable prospect of broadband services. They’re called schools.”

Translation: There’s no on-ramp connecting public education to the information highway. This means that kids sit in schools where not much of consequence involves electronic information and go into a world of work where everything of consequence does. No wonder they crash and burn.

Gore is reportedly first going to tell the media leaders something they want to hear: He’s in favor of deregulation of the industries that are buying up Hollywood--the baby Bells, grownup Bells and wanna-be Bells. They can charge what they want, provide service whenever and wherever they want, divide the turf as they want.

But he’s going to be watching them. He has warned that, “Video on demand will be a great thing. It will be a far greater thing to demand that our efforts give every child access to the educational riches we have in such abundance.” The implied threat is that, unless the information moguls devote some pick-and-shovel work to connecting our schools with the information highway--promptly and inexpensively--the FCC or Congress might mandate such a thing.

The California Legislature is looking into a plan to create a fund, independently administered and overseen by the state Public Utilities Commission, that would combine industry contributions, ratepayer funds and other available money such as fines and penalties to accomplish much of this.

Sen. Herschel Rosenthal (D-Los Angeles) last year introduced and Gov. Pete Wilson signed a bill calling for a study on this concept linking a regulatory body, industry and education. The study estimated the program would cost $150 million a year.

Bipartisanship in such matters is not new. In Indiana, a succession of Republican school superintendents and a Democratic governor have quietly begun placing an information highway on-ramp--in the form of a personal computer--in the home of every child in grades four through 12. Rosenthal’s plan, though similar, doesn’t cover the home on-ramp.

Maybe each of the big information superpowers represented Tuesday should pledge to “take” a state in such a way. That would give the Yalta prediction a new meaning.