Since the 2020-2021 school year kicked off to a start, over half of the K-12 students in the U.S. have been learning through only a virtual medium. This has major implications for the quality of education that students are receiving, and is especially troubling when considering the depth of the digital learning gap in this country. This chasm in access to technology, which affects how students engage with educational opportunities, is a product and driver of the inequalities that have long been rooted in American society.
While the digital learning gap has been widening over the last few decades and spreading throughout the schools and classrooms of America, it took COVID-19 to truly understand the magnitude of these inequalities. Closing this divide in education will take work — with an increase in access to technology resources, one-to-one policies that ensure each student has a laptop, and a commitment to ensuring that families have adequate internet. In an age when students have been thrust to their screens for an education, these measures are necessary to create equity and ensure that all American children may learn.
The Double Edged Sword of Technology Gaps
The modern internet age that began in the 1980s not only heralded an era of technological progress but also ushered in a period of growing inequality. In the United States, technology exacerbated what is now the largest income gap in the world. Between the years 2000 and 2009, average employees gained 2.3% in their wages, managers gained 9% in their wages and board members saw their wages skyrocket by 19%. This led to record levels of income inequality.
One product of this technological boom was the displacement of lower-skilled workers. As new technology was developed for the work environment, high-skilled workers were able to boost overall workplace productivity by offloading their more mechanical functions to machinery; the lower-skilled workers who once completed these functions were instead now being replaced by technology. This shift gave higher-skilled workers opportunity for growth while pushing lower-skilled workers to the margins. As a result, the income increase that defined high-skilled jobs is hardly present for low-skilled workers, whose incomes have remained stagnant for 50 years.
While technology as a means of production displaced lower-income workers by taking up their tasks, technology as a commodity became increasingly unattainable for the very people it displaced in the workforce. In 2016, Pew Research Center published a report stating that Americans with lower incomes are less likely to be up to date on technology adoption. Pew also found that 64% of Americans with an annual income of $30,000 and above reported access to at-home broadband, a smartphone and a computer and/or tablet, compared to 18% of those living with an annual income below $30,000.
These technological inequities come with severe consequences. This phenomenon drives up the demand for high-skilled workers as lower-skilled jobs are consumed by the wave of technology, leading to further income inequality and more barriers to access an education for a modern workforce. This results in disproportionate wealth accumulation and the trailing skills and education of low-income communities. This is because the gap between the median income for those with a college degree versus only a high school diploma in 1979 was $9,690 and this gap had grown to $17,500 in 2013.
Education Takes the Fall for Income and Technology Inequalities
The income inequality furthered by the advent of technology has propelled another troubling trend: educational inequality. Sean Reardon, a Stanford sociologist, identifies that educational achievement differences are more closely aligned with family income than any other demographic factor. Researchers have also shown that these achievement gaps have already begun growing by the time lower-income children reach kindergarten.
When all three of these phenomena — income inequality, the rise of technology, and education gaps — collide, it leads to troubling impacts on youth. The digital divide has especially pronounced effects on children, whose parents’ socioeconomic situation determines their ability to engage with increasingly technology-reliant educational materials. Nearly all schools across the US require at least some form of technology to complete assignments outside of the classroom. COVID-19, which has forced classrooms to adopt remote-learning softwares such as Zoom or Google Meet, has only accelerated this trend.
During the last five years, the detrimental effects of educational technology gaps have become especially clear. In 2015, children with computers and internet access at home were older and had parents who were more educated and with higher incomes than those without access to the internet and technology. Despite this unequal landscape, a 2017 report found that 70% of America’s teachers assign homework to be completed online even though more than five million school-age children do not have access to the internet or computers at home. In 2018, 17% of all teenage students said that they were unable to complete homework assignments due to a lack of technological resources. Now that classes are being held nearly entirely virtual, all students, regardless of their ability to access technology, are struggling to keep up with the amounts of online homework being assigned to them.
As teachers rely more extensively on technology to complement their curricula, there is a greater burden placed disproportionately upon students in low-income neighborhoods. Lower-income students are at a much higher risk of falling behind due to online instruction, with 60% of lower-income students receiving below-quality virtual instruction and 40% receiving no instruction at all, compared to 48% and 10% respectively for average students. This same chasm can be seen in the number of learning months lost due to virtual education for different cohorts of students; while the average student has lost 6.8 months of learning, the low-income has lost nearly double, 12.4 months.
These trends are racially defined as well: Most children with technology and internet access are White or Asian American. Black students are more likely to lack technological resources needed to succeed in school. In addition, Black and Latinx students are more likely to fall further behind due to COVID-19 online learning than their White and Asian American peers. While the average student is estimated to fall 6.8 months behind, a Black student could fall 10.3 months behind and Hispanic students 9.2 months.
In addition, while socioeconomic status and race play a role in a child’s ability to access the internet at home, so does location. When household income is held constant, students who live in rural areas are less likely to have internet access than students who live in urban areas. In contrast, White, middle-to-upper class and urban students have the highest level of technology access in the country.
All in all, students’ abilities to learn virtually are not improving over time; instead, they are facing even more challenges as the technology gap widens. A student’s ability to have at-home learning resources is largely dependent on factors such as location, socioeconomic status and race.
COVID-19’s Impact on the Digital Learning Gap
2020 saw a dramatic change for many American school districts as numerous educational institutions closed their doors to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. This sent over 20 million K-12 students home to learn virtually. Despite the new emphasis on remote learning, there are currently 16.9 million students living in the United States who do not have access to a computer.
In Kentucky, a largely rural population, students from Leslie County High School discussed how they resorted to desperate means to access the internet for their classes, with some using mobile hotspots, others frequenting local fast food restaurants and still others visiting family and friends with adequate access. As these students fall further and further behind, their ability to catch up also continues to lag further and further behind.
The move online presented additional problems for students in low-income districts, however, which were forced to focus their resources in different avenues. Lower-income public schools, for instance, needed to put most of their resources toward ensuring food security for their students after closure forced millions of students eligible for free or reduced school lunches home. On the other hand, higher-income public schools were able to redirect resources toward ensuring students had the proper technological resources to learn digitally from home. In Connecticut, for example, the wealthier Manchester school district was able to afford each student their own Chromebook, while in the less-affluent New Britain, students lacked individual technology and up-to-date equipment. During COVID-19, s lack of funding has created massive barriers for students in districts like New Britain to receive an education on par with that of their peers in districts like Manchester.
As many schools around the country face challenging decisions to either open or remain virtual for the 2020-2021 school year, rural schools have an especially tough choice to make. Spotty internet at home often forces students to rely on libraries or cafes to do schoolwork. Some students rely on mobile hotspots, but those can be costly which proves to be an ineffective solution for lower-income students.
In addition to disadvantaging lower-income, minority and rural students, the current situation has also gravely displaced students with disabilities, who cannot learn virtually with the same resources that other students use. Students with disabilities, who are already playing educational catch-up, are far more likely to fall behind given the current situation. In school, many of these students are gaining vital social and soft skills that they do not receive virtually, and many parents do not have the time to sit with their child during school hours to help them with the controls of Zoom: raising hands, muting and unmuting, and turning video on and off. For this especially vulnerable and overlooked demographic, virtual learning presents challenges that hinder an effective education.
Given all of the difficulties that present themselves during this school year, it is important to recognize that certain groups of students have many more obstacles to overcome to be on equal footing with their peers.
Improving Educational Technology Gaps
The digital learning gap will not be resolved with touch-and-go reforms; rather, it will take significant work and innovation to create a system that fosters equality without regard to a student’s race, ability, location or socioeconomic status.
One effective long-term solution would be to expand at-home access to technological resources, community by community. One way to do this would be by authorizing funds to be used for technology bonds and grants through the school district. As the Gadsden Independent School District in New Mexico has modeled, funding from such grants can go toward providing hotspots to the students who lack at home internet. GISD provided nearly 2,500 mobile hotspots to families who had enrolled students. Another district in New Mexico, Hatch Valley Public Schools, came up with a solution for homes that lack cellular service by installing external antennas at three of their schools in order to expand the reach of the school WiFi.
In March, after nearly 30,000 schools across the country closed, internet providers such as Comcast waived late fees for current customers and increased the available data for mobile hotspots. Comcast also offered new customers who had K-12 students free service for 60 days.
Some school districts have gotten creative with their solutions, with one district in Los Angeles partnering with PBS stations to run a virtual learning program through television channels. After seeing California’s success with this method, Arkansas PBS also began televising the state’s virtual curriculum daily.
In addition to these district-by-district reforms, there should be an overarching baseline technology policy for all school-aged children enrolled in public schools to ensure technology equality: a one-to-one laptop policy. This policy has been championed by the governor of Connecticut, Ned Lamont, who initiated a $43 million plan that would provide 50,000 laptops and pay 60,000 students’ internet bills for a year. This plan would ensure that roughly 50,000 students without computers and 60,000 students without internet access at home would not fall behind during virtual learning. While some might argue that this approach is not fiscally feasible, much of the money that would have been spent on in-person learning now lays unused or ill-usable, and therefore a re-appropriation of funds — as seen in New Mexico — appears to be fiscally manageable.
The goal of providing everyone with an equal, high-level education cannot occur within the current system. The root of the issue lays in the need for a foundational educational reform nation-wide. Everyone deserves a fair chance at educational success, and the only way to achieve this for all students is by reforming educational institutions from the ground up.
Image by Burst is licensed under the Unsplash License.
