E-Rate (and other government education tech funding) is a very convoluted, murky system that seems to only benefit large corporations that want those high-bid contracts to sell a bunch of their technology that never gets maintained or repaired. Good ideas, bad follow-through. I've seen it too many times where hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent on the next whiz-bang whatever that will save the school from "falling behind the curve", only to see most of it broken or lying dormant 3 years later due to no funding going to the continuance of that technology. It's the biggest waste of money because those who win the contracts don't generally give a sh*t about the students that will supposedly benefit from it all. In the specific case of E-Rate, its nice because it funds the back-end network/server infrastructure mostly - but then you just see horribly configured Windows AD servers that get touched by a million different "sysadmins" and end up less than useless, clogging up the network and workstations with malware.
You want to make a difference? Volunteer at your local school. Install Linux on some old PCs along with edu packages (skolelinux comes to mind) that you don't use any more and give it to their Kindergarten class. They'll love you to pieces. Especially if you come in once in a while and actually teach them some stuff.