For years, I have said:

If you’re not telling your story, somebody else is, and it may not be the story you want told.

Most people hear that as a statement about communications.

I never intended it that way.

I meant it as a statement about power.

Stories influence public policy. Stories determine where resources flow. Stories shape how communities are perceived by people who have never visited them. And stories often determine who gets invited into important conversations and who gets left out.

I learned that lesson through broadband.

Long before the pandemic brought the homework gap into the national spotlight, rural educators, students, and families were already living it.

Teachers saw students struggling to complete assignments because they lacked reliable internet access at home.

Families drove to parking lots to use public Wi-Fi.

Students learned to work around limitations that many policymakers did not even realize existed.

The stories were everywhere.

The evidence was not.

That changed when the Quello Center at Michigan State University and Merit Network partnered with school districts across Michigan to examine the relationship between home internet access and student outcomes. Working with participating districts, researchers surveyed more than 3,200 students across fifteen predominantly rural Michigan school districts and connected those findings to standardized assessment data and internet speed tests. The results showed that students without home broadband, or who depended on a cellphone alone for internet access, faced measurable disadvantages in digital skills, homework completion, grades, and postsecondary aspirations. 12

Those findings mattered.

Not because they told us something we did not already suspect.

Not because they generated headlines.

Not because they produced another report that would sit on a shelf.

They mattered because they transformed lived experience into evidence.

For the first time, rural communities could point to something more than anecdotes. We had data. We had research. We had findings that could travel into meetings, legislative discussions, agency briefings, and policy conversations that local stories alone often struggled to reach.

The research did not create our story.

It gave our story standing.

That distinction is important.

Research is often described as a tool for measuring reality. I think it serves another purpose that is equally important.

Research is a form of representation.

It helps communities make themselves visible.

It allows experiences that might otherwise be dismissed as isolated or anecdotal to become part of the public record.

In that sense, the research became our voice.

Acknowledgments

The homework gap research was successful because it was built on genuine collaboration between researchers, educators, school districts, and community partners.

I am especially grateful to Dr. Johannes Bauer and Dr. Keith Hampton of the Quello Center, whose leadership helped transform local observations into rigorous research capable of informing conversations far beyond our region. Their work demonstrated how thoughtful scholarship can elevate community voices and connect local experience to state and national policy discussions. 12

I am equally grateful to Charlotte Bewersdorff and Dr. Pierrette Renée Dagg of Merit Network, whose commitment to the K–12 Citizen Science initiative helped create a model for collaboration between researchers, educators, and communities. Their work showed that research and education networks can do more than connect institutions. They can connect people, ideas, and experiences in ways that create meaningful change. 34

I would also like to acknowledge the Superintendents of EUPSchools. Throughout my career, I have had the privilege of working alongside educational leaders who understood that data is not collected for its own sake. It is collected to improve opportunities for students and strengthen communities. Their willingness to participate, collaborate, and share their districts’ experiences made this work possible.

Most importantly, I want to recognize the teachers, students, families, and participating districts who contributed their time, data, and trust to the project. Research only becomes meaningful when communities are willing to share their stories. The findings belonged not only to the researchers who analyzed the data, but also to the communities that made the research possible.

The lesson I carry from that experience remains unchanged: when communities, educators, researchers, and institutions work together, stories become evidence, evidence becomes understanding, and understanding creates the opportunity for meaningful action.

In many ways, that is the real legacy of the homework gap project.

The research did not create our story.

The research helped us tell it.

And for many rural communities that had struggled for years to be heard, the research became our voice.

The findings were ultimately translated into a Michigan public policy brief focused on overcoming the homework gap and the role of broadband connectivity in student success. The research entered state policy conversations through a framework specifically designed to connect university research with decision-makers and community leaders. 34

Nationally, the work became part of a growing body of evidence showing that broadband was no longer merely a telecommunications issue.

It was an educational issue.

It was a workforce issue.

It was an economic development issue.

It was a community opportunity issue. 56

That does not mean every policy response was right.

In fact, one lesson I took from the experience is that evidence and policy are two different things.

The research helped demonstrate that students needed access to connectivity beyond the school building. It did not automatically determine which federal program should address the problem.

I have consistently argued that different Universal Service Fund programs exist for different purposes and should remain aligned with those purposes.

Schools and libraries are the mission of E-Rate.

Household affordability and residential access are the mission of Lifeline.

Network availability is supported through other Universal Service Fund mechanisms.

Each program exists because a different problem requires a different solution.

That distinction matters.

I support connectivity on school buses and educational vehicles because those environments are extensions of the educational experience.

In rural America, students often spend significant time traveling not only to and from school, but also to career and technical education programs, academic competitions, athletic events, field experiences, and other school-sponsored activities.

Those vehicles are part of the educational ecosystem.

Supporting connectivity in those settings directly supports learning.

That is very different from transforming E-Rate into a general-purpose residential broadband program. Household connectivity challenges should be addressed through programs specifically designed to support residential affordability and access.

The point is not that research should prescribe a specific policy solution.

The point is that research should illuminate the problem clearly enough that policymakers can have informed debates about the best solution.

Evidence should inform policy, not replace it.

Today, I think about that experience often when discussions turn to educational data, artificial intelligence, and initiatives such as MiGreatDataLake.

People hear the phrase data lake and immediately think about technology.

I think about voice.

Who gets represented?

Whose experiences become visible?

Who gains the ability to understand their circumstances through evidence?

Who gains the ability to tell their story with confidence?

The value of a data system is not what it stores.

The value of a data system is what it helps people learn.

More importantly, it is what it helps people become.

The homework gap research taught me that communities already possess knowledge about their challenges. What they often lack is a mechanism to communicate that knowledge in ways that influence systems larger than themselves.

When research, data, and community partnerships come together, that changes.

Stories become evidence.

Evidence becomes understanding.

Understanding becomes action.

And sometimes, if you are fortunate, the research becomes the voice of people who have been trying to tell their story all along.

Because if you’re not telling your story, somebody else is.

And one of the most powerful things we can do with data is make sure communities have the ability to tell their own.