Evan Marwell wants to measure your pipes. The self-described serial entrepreneur is founder and CEO of Education SuperHighway, a nonprofit group whose goal is assessing the state of broadband in our nation’s schools. So is there enough juice to support 21st-century learning in most schools? Not by a long shot, says Marwell.

“We have to get the right infrastructure in place, and I realized no one knew what the state of that was,” he says. “In particular, they don’t know the actual experience students and teachers are having in the classroom.”

For Patty Eyer, that experience has been mixed. The media specialist at South Orangetown Middle School in Blauvelt, NY, says there are times of the day when students simply can’t access the Internet.

“The teachers are being asked to integrate tech into their classes,” she says, “and yet we don’t have enough computer labs and laptops. And even if we did, we don’t have the bandwidth. We have Internet, with [Ethernet] drops throughout the school. Are they 100 percent effective and efficient? No.”

That’s a familiar story to Marwell. Three years ago, after joining the board of his daughter’s school, Katherine Delmar Burke School in San Francisco, he questioned why classrooms didn’t have more technology. Marwell realized they simply lacked the necessary infrastructure.

It’s a pervasive problem. Eighty percent of our nation’s schools report that their broadband connections are inadequate to meet their needs, according to ‘The Broadband Imperative,” a May 2012 study by the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA). Schools will need connections of 100 megabytes per second for every 1,000 students and staff by 2014–2015—and one gigabyte per second by 2017–2018, concludes SETDA.

Starting September 10, Marwell hopes to help schools—and, more critically, the U.S. Department of Education—get an accurate read on the situation. That’s the day that Education SuperHighway goes live—enabling students, teachers, administrators, librarians, and other school personnel to log on to the site and have their connection speed analyzed within minutes.

The money is there to upgrade schools’ technology, says Marwell, pointing to the E-rate program, a federal fund that spends $2.25 billion a year to provide telecommunication services to schools and libraries. “We need to refine [E-rate’s] goals, so it’s not just about connecting classrooms, but how they connect,” he says. “E-rate is certainly providing enough investment.”

Schools that plan to have their networks read on Education SuperHighway can also assess their ability to access specific sites, such as YouTube and Wikipedia, which require higher bandwidth. The project, which is funded by private investors and manned by five volunteers, plus Marwell, has a goal for each school in the country to run at least 10 tests—conducted by 10 different people or the same person 10 times—to give Marwell’s crew one million tests to assess.

With that information, Marwell says they’ll be able to inform a larger plan to determine the funding needed to properly wire every school.

“This isn’t a money problem, it’s an information problem,” he says. “We don’t know who has what and what needs to be fixed. But there’s definitely going to be money to do this.”

Surveying 3,000 people between the ages of 15 and 25, the study found that in the last year, 41 percent engaged in some form of digitally-based political activity, such as starting an online political group, writing or passing along a political blog, or sharing political videos. Specifically, 43 percent of white, 41 percent of black, 38 percent of Latino, and 36 percent of Asian American youth took part in at least one act of participatory politics during the prior 12 months, says “Youth & Participatory Politics.” The report defines participatory politics as “interactive, peer-based acts through which individuals and groups seek to exert both voice and influence on issues of public concern.”

Unlike prior studies of youth and media, the report says this one includes large numbers of black, Latino, and Asian American respondents, which “allow for unique and powerful statistical comparisons across race with a focus on young people.”

Interestingly, it finds that contrary to reports of a digital divide, large proportions of young people across racial and ethnic groups have access to the Internet and use online social media regularly to stay connected to their family and friends, and to pursue interests and hobbies. The study says 96 percent of white, 94 percent of black, 96 percent of Latino, and 98 percent of Asian American youth report having access to an Internet-connected computer. Those youth who engaged in at least one participatory political act also were almost twice as likely to report voting in 2010, as those who didn’t.

Of particular interest to school librarians is the fact that young people tend to get their news through participatory channels but believe they’d benefit from learning how to judge the credibility of what they find online, says the report.

‚ÄúWhen we asked young people if they thought they and their friends would benefit from learning more about how to tell if online information was trustworthy, 84 percent said ‚ÄòYes!,‚Äô says YPP Chair Joseph Kahne, one of the study‚Äôs principal investigators and an education professor at Mills College in Oakland, CA, in a release. ¬†”In massive numbers, youth are saying they need help with digital media literacy.”

In fact, the study showed that youth get news almost as often from social media channels as they do from traditional avenues, with 45 percent saying their information comes at least once a week from Twitter or Facebook feeds through friends or family, compared to 49 percent who say they get their information from newspapers or magazines at least once a week.

With the presidential election heating up, students are turning to online channels to learn about the political environment and to engage in the process, giving educators an opportunity to help kids understand and develop critical thinking skills that they can take with them as they grow into mature digital citizens.

“Participatory politics are an important avenue to provide young people with a level of voice and control not often seen in the realm of institutional politics,” the report concludes. “This is a unique and important moment. If stakeholders at multiple levels provide appropriate supports, participatory politics may provide valuable opportunities to engage young people in the political realm, giving them greater control, voice, and potentially influence over the issues that matter most in their lives.”