Writer Charlie Guy takes a look at the challenges facing the “have nots” in his ePluribus Media Journal article Digital Educational Apartheid.
According to recent report for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, there exists …
“… a high school dropout epidemic in America. Each year, almost one third of all public high school students’ and nearly one half of all blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans fail to graduate from public high school with their class. Many of these students abandon school with less than two years to complete their high school education. Given the clear detrimental economic and personal costs to them, why do young people drop out of high school in such large numbers?"[1]
At the same time, many well-meaning educators, politicians, and citizens are basking in self-congratulations for having successfully eliminated the at-school digital divide (the gap between individuals able to benefit from technology and those who aren’t) as a contributing factor to this Silent Epidemic. But, millions of our country’s economically and socially disadvantaged learners are still suffering a Digital Learning Apartheid. For them, digital isolation at home only further expands the gaps in digital learning participation and academic achievement between them and the have learners.
Although the more generally accepted term in education for this class of learners is at-risk students, I have chosen instead to use the term have-not learners first, to better clarify the cause and amplify the severity of their situation. Traditionally, when the term at-risk is applied to education, it refers to the risk of learners dropping out of school due to their family’s low social economic status (SES). Secondly, substituting the term learners for students broadens the definitional scope to include these former high school dropouts who wish to use re-education or workforce development to now gain more meaningful employment.
Another pitfall is the use of the term at-risk without specifying in what respect the student is at risk. The danger is that school personnel and others will focus primarily or solely on the personal variables and characteristics, viewing the at-risk student as deficient because he/she does not fit the system rather than viewing the situation from a broader, more systemic perspective (i.e., the system as deficient because it does not meet the educational needs of all of its students).[2]
While I do not wish to become entangled in attempts to lay blame on the potential responsible parties for the blight of these learners, I do feel, however, the term have-not learners more clearly dramatizes the truth of what these learners face not only in their school settings, as so dramatically pointed out by Jonathan Kozol in his The Shame of the Nation, The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, but also at home.
Historically, the early concerns and discussions of the digital divide assumed that the most important issue was to provide technical access for all learners via infrastructural improvements to our country’s public schools. This concern led to the creation of the federal e-rate program that invested public funds into the initial wiring of our country’s schools to provide Internet access. This approach assumed that increased learner academic achievement would occur merely as the result of providing all learners, regardless of their families’ financial situations, with equal at-school access to digital learning resources. The approach assumed the World Wide Web is simply an inert data bank, devoid of dynamic interchange.
What was neither anticipated nor addressed then, nor is being focused upon now, is disparate at-home access to the Internet. While have-not learners from our country’s poorest families may in fact now have access to the Internet at school as well as to school digital learning resources, when they leave school at the end of the day, they suffer from a disproportionate degree of at-home Internet isolation.
According to a September 2006 report released by the U.S. Department of Education, there does in fact exist an at-home digital learning participation gap between have and have-not learners:
I. Families Annual Incomes Gaps
| Type of Learner | Families Annual Incomes | At-home Computer Use | At-home Digital Learning Participation Gap |
| have-not learners | Under $20,000 | 37% | 51% |
| $20,000-$34,999 | 55% | 33% | |
| have learners | $75,000 or more | 88% | NA |
II. Racial/Ethnic Gaps
| Type of Learner | At-home Computer Use | At-home Digital Learning Participation Gap | |
| American Indian | 43% | 35% | |
| Blacks | 46% | 32% | |
| Hispanics | 48% | 30% | |
| Asian | 74% | NA | |
| Whites | 78% | NA |
III. Parent Educational Attainment Gaps
| Type of Learner | At-home Computer Use | At-home Digital Learning Participation Gap | |
| Less than High School Credential | 35% | 47%* | |
| High School Credential | 55% | 27% | |
| Some College | 72% | 10% | |
| Bachelor’s Degree | 82% | NA | |
| Graduate Education | 88% | NA |
*As compared against a graduate education.
IV. Household Language Gaps
| Type of Learner | At-home Computer Use | At-home Digital Learning Participation Gap | |
| Spanish Only | 32% | 37% | |
| Not Spanish Only | 69% | NA |
V. Poverty Status
| Type of Learner | At-home Computer Use | At-home Digital Learning Participation Gap | |
| In Poverty | 39% | 37% | |
| Not In Poverty | 76% | NA |
Source: Page 15, Table 3 of the Computer and Internet Use by Students in 2003, Statistical Analysis Report, Released in 2006 by the National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S.Department of Education. 1990 K Street NW, Washington, DC. 20006
The Expanding Digital Learning Participation Gap
Read the rest of the article …
About the Author: Charlie Guy’s unique educational technology vision is based not only upon his past traditional and e-commerce private sector business experiences, but also upon his initial professional educational training and teaching experiences coupled with his volunteer economic development experiences in Tampa’s inner city. This compilation of personal experiences fuels his passion for educational change and the patience to conduct it properly.
Other ePluribus Contributors and Fact Checkers: JeninRI, cho, GreyHawk, kfred, roxy, standingup
If you like what ePMedia’s been doing with research, reviews and interviews, please consider donating to help with our efforts.
Ok, I’ll be controversial here. Children, especially in elementary school, do not need computers. There is NO evidence that identifies the lack of computer access at any age as a cause of high dropout rates. Children need good teachers. They need small classes, not just smaller classes. They need well-run schools where the leadership and the staff understand how children at different ages learn. They need to know how to work with other children in groups, not just work alone. They need classmates that are not all just like them. They need to have classes that are free from chaos and free from boredom.
More than having a computer at home, I want them to have an adult at home who reads regularly. I want that adult to read to them before the child is old enough to come to school. There should be a lot of books and magazines and newspapers in their homes. I want adults around who will help children understand how to evaluate what they see or read or hear, whether it’s from a book or newspaper, or TV or on-line source. Computers aren’t equipped to do that – that takes human interaction and human judgment.
I’m a lot more concerned about the literacy divide than I am about the digital divide. Perhaps there is just a little here to think about: buying hardware and software is good for big business, because it has to be done over and over again. Having books in the house is cheap, because libraries can loan out books over and over again with relatively little cost to families. Computers, however, are cheaper than teachers or school buildings. It makes for less public investment through taxes, more “donatable” stuff from the business community.
Poverty is an important issue here, but providing computers for poor children to have at home isn’t a very good answer. A computer at home will be obsolete in a very short number of years, yet poor families will not have the funds to upgrades,buy another, get all new software, etc. Donated computers, a solution that gets trotted out from time to time, are a lousy idea because of their obsolescence. Often a donated business computer will not run any software that is useful, or what it will run is old, and quickly outgrown by the student.
Computers at school are used too much for drill and practice. Children spend too much time learning how to use software that will be obsolete by the time they get to college. Students used to have to learn some kind of programming language – now that seems silly. Students in some schools are still learning word processing and spreadsheet programs that are already out of date. And many schools have children spending hours learning how to “keyboard”, when they don’t know how to read or perform basic math operations fluently. By the time students are out of high school, they’ll likely be speaking their words into a computer rather than typing them in, yet we persist in having whole courses in keyboarding.
Bill Gates is a bright man, and his generosity with his money is commendable. However, being wealthy and smart and astute about computers does not make anyone, including Mr. Gates, an automatic expert on education. As one example, it’s just the problem that you see in the article here: There’s a dropout problem, particularly among poor minority kids. There’s a huge difference in rates of access to computers and their use in the homes of minority kids, especially those who are poor. Therefore, shall we assume that if the digital divide were closed in homes as well as in classrooms, that the dropout right would also close? Isn’t that the underlying theme of the essay?
Here’s what any person who has had even a single basic stat class should say: Correlation does not equal causation. The fact that two things occur together does not mean that one causes the other. Among all school students, dropouts are more likely among those with bigger feet, too. Does this mean that having big feet causes dropping out? Not really – the older a kid is, the more likely he or she is to drop out, and the older kids are, the bigger their feet, too. Providing computers for poor families will not in itself cure the dropout rate.
There is no quick fix for turning around the dropout rate. We have to start with little kids and do things right for them and keep on doing things right as they grow up.Maybe this includes giving them computer access, but that will never be a substitute for good care, good health, and good parenting before they start school; and good teachers, schools, and classrooms once they get to school.
Research has been pretty consistent in showing that children from lower income homes are often far behind their richer peers by fourth grade. That is because they (the poorer student) has been exposed to less print and fewer words. There are a number of possible solutions, but computers at the lower grades are not the end all.
I teach high school students, in a very poor city, and I find the computer to be a crutch or an excuse. Students do not do research in books and if they have no computer at home, well research simply won’t be done, even thought the town does have a library. If a student does have a computer, the printer is always broken, so an assignment couldn’t be printed, so could an extension be given?
Kidspeak beat me to the punch, so I will not simply repeat her points, other than to say I very stongly agree with them. Computers and internet access will not educate kids that can not read well or are lack numeracy.
Gates made billions by illegally monopolizing the business market and foisting annoying arcane software on people. While that does make him a robber baron, it does not make him an education expert, and I am not ready to line up and kiss his ring. If every one one of my 3rd and 4th graders had a computer on their desk and a computer at home, I still would have 27 students, two of which read at grade level. Take away the damn computers, hire another well-trained and well-paid teacher, break my class in two, and we will teach the kids to read. Oh, by the way, my school “library” has no librarian and has had no books purchased since 1982. That’s before most of the parents of my students were born, which also part of the problem.
The digital divide is not the problem. The problem is the literacy divide. Computers in the lower grades are a detriment to literacy, not an aid. People teach reading, not machines.
Quit wasting your time creating feel-good opportunities for companies who dump old computers, or new ones for that matter, on schools. Get rid of the tax write-offs, as well. Cut every CEO’s salary in half (Heck, I’m being generous people. I could live on only one million a year.) and reduce class size with the money. Have one day of peace in Iraq, and turn the billion or so death dollars into education funds. Stopping bull shitting about “Children are the most important thing” and start paying the people who work with children like you pay people who work with money, the real most important thing.
When we think of “computers” we think of the box much like the one you’re sitting at now. If you’re like about 90% of the world’s computer users, it runs some version of Windows; otherwise, it runs a Mac or some Unix workalike (like Linux or FreeBSD). We use them for business, for communication, and for entertainment.
They are a fact of life. Even today, a person who doesn’t have a little familiarity with computers is at a disadvantage in the job market, simply because so many things have been computerized.
For that reason alone there needs to be some exposure to computers in schools. At the very least, kids should be able to turn them on, load up a program and write a note or use a spreadsheet. You don’t need Windows for that. There are alternatives for other operating systems that work just as well that don’t require you to pay what we in the tech world call the Microsoft tax. OpenOffice comes immediately to mind.
Unfortunately educational computing is a lot like educational television. A lot of potential, but there are still problems with the implementation.
But why do computers have to be like this? Time to think outside the (beige) box, and at least one project is doing so right now. Take a look at the One Laptop Per Child project. These are not the Acer Ferraris Microsoft has been giving away to bloogers in the hope that they’ll say nice things about Vista. These are purpose built machines that are going to sell for about $100 each.
They don’t have fancy displays. What they have is adequate to get the job done.
They don’t have hard drives. Programs are stored in flash memory, with USB ports for connectivity to external devices.
They don’t have Windows. They will run a version of Linux.
They will have tools for collaboration, exploration and networking. In fact they will form automatic mesh networks anytime you get a couple of them together.
They won’t be tied to main power. They will run on batteries and come with a foot pedal so you can recharge the computer anytime you can sit down and pedal a bit.
The idea is to take these computers out into the bush, in classrooms in Cameroon and India and Slovenia and Paraguay and anywhere else there might be a need — including parts of the United States — and make them affordable enough that it is at least conceivable that you can give one to every child. By doing so they can have a window into the digital world, as well as being able to communicate with their peers (and presumably with others, locally or around the world.)
Sometimes we get fixated on the idea that we have to shoehorn solutions into our perceptions of the way things have to be, and often the real solutions to problems require breaking out of those old paradigms and coming up with something new. Thinking outside the box, in other words.
Will something like One Laptop Per Child revolutionize education? I don’t know. But I know that it never will if it’s never tried.
Omir, you know I love and respect you, so don’t take this response personally, please. The IT component of school district budgets keeps going up. Sadly there is no correlation with student achievement. Millions are spent, companies are created to suck up the money, and the feeding at the trough continues. One of the lesser Bush brothers, Neil “Anybody want to Loot a Savings & Loan?” Bush is currently raking it in the bucks with his educational software program and accompanying hardware. Kinds makes you want to grab a Billy Beer. “Education spending” is too often a way for enrich the buddies of the administration and school boards. Here’s an example from Detroit. Give me time and I will find you a hundred like it nationwide. Here’s another one. My school has been wired three times, because the first two times were messed up. Three contracts, three rich happy supporters of the city council and school board. But it doesn’t matter because most of the crappy Dell machines the district bought (through a business set up by a local middle man between Dell & the district), don’t have enough RAM to run anything. And we don’t have the money to upgrade. I checked after I read this article at lunch. We have 42 working computers in a school of about 280 students. 28 are in the computer lab. 6 are in the administration area. 8 are in classrooms. There are at least 75 broken computers in classrooms, closets, and the computer lab.
Yes, kids who have computers at home and who have access to the internet will generally do better than kids who do not. But it’s not the computers that make the difference. The computers are just part of the accrual of advantage that this country is built on and Bush is the poster boy for. The laptops you mention are well intended, but they will not work in the inner city of America. They will be perceived of and rejected as objects of apartheid, to use the catchy term employed by the author of the diary.
And just to spread the blame a little, I asked kids in my class at Christmas how many had X-Boxes or a similar set up. I had 24 students at that time and 22 had them. How many had computers? 1. Parents, and misplaced values, need to take some of the blame also.
No, I’m not taking this personally. You’re the educator, and I’m not. I’ve never taught in a classroom, and I don’t have access to the data (and wouldn’t know what to do with it if I did).
Yeah, I know about Neal Bush. He’s the symbol of what’s wrong with the use of computers in education. There has got to be a right way to do it. I don’t know what it is, though. I hadn’t really heard of a good, innovative concept on using the computer for education since Apple started donating computers to schools (on the theory that students would get hooked on them and stay with Apple when they graduated), until I came across OLPC.
You may be right about the OLPC computers being perceived as “objects of apartheid” in the inner city. I don’t know. It’s not my world. But I’d be willing to try this experiment: Get some OLPC computers out there, but don’t tell the kids they’re computers. Instead of being seen as second-rate computers, don’t set any preconceived notions of what they are. Let the kids figure it out for themselves. Let the kids decide whether they sink or swim. I will guarantee you the kids will come up with uses for them that you and I would never dream of. That in itself is education — the kind of education where you use curiosity and creativity rather than rote memorization of dry facts. The kind we should be promoting, in my admittedly underinformed opinion.
Yeah, some of them will almost certainly come up with uses you and I wouldn’t approve of, like arranging drug deals. This is the price of freedom.
And let me tell you something else about these laptops that I don’t think the OLPC website addresses, but a friend on a local Linux mailing list pointed out. These laptops are based on the “open source/free software” concept. If you don’t work at Microsoft you never get to see what Windows is made of. The source code is locked down tightly, and I can tell you from experience that even employees at the company who don’t have personal responsibility for working on a particular branch of code aren’t allowed access to that code. The software provided under OLPC all contains the source code. There is apparently a button (virtual, most likely) you can press to “see source” that will let you look at the source code of an app and see how it does its magic. Kids can take those apps, study them, and figure out how to write their own software. A little bit like it was almost 30 years ago when I first got into computing, where you could buy a program from Beagle Bros or type it in from a magazine and see the source code, find out how things were done and adapt those coding tricks to your own programs.
This is subversive in another way as well. When those kids go out into the world, the ones who get into IT are going to start asking to see the source code on the applications they run. It’s just another bit of chipping away at the wall of secrecy that corporate America is trying to barricade itself behind.
Oh, and you’re right about the Xboxes. Although there are ways to turn your Xbox into a functioning computer. Imagine what would happen if those 22 kids got their hands on something like that. It takes some work on newer Xboxes, but the rewards are worth it (again, IMHO).
I would be a worth a try. Certainly you’d have to present the gadgets as something else, not a laptop. The kids know what laptops are and won’t be fooled. But as a something else, well, it’s worth a try. Anything that stimulates creativity is worth a try. But the basic point that Kidspeak and I are making, if I can risk speaking for her here, is that if you do not have literacy skills and do not value literacy skills, no tool will make you literate or value literacy. And literacy is were we get the knowledge that becomes power.
By the way, did you notice that the kids in the pictures of the diary have cell phones? If you take the cost of the cell phones & services & the cable costs & additional services & the Wii or x-box & games, you could buy a decent laptop and DSL service. You might need to wear cheaper athletic shoes and a plain hoodie. Those are the parental values I’m talking about. If I’m channeling Bill Cosby here, well, familiarity and frustration breeds crankiness.
I think I had the happy medium growing up. One or two days a week, my gradeschool education included scheduled time in front of a computer, where I could play games, type, learn a little logic, etc.
I’m all for computers on campus. That’s not the same as computers in the classroom.
I did some volunteer work in a classroom when I worked at Microsoft (on their dime – they’re not all bad, really). I’d go once a week, and the sweet young things would sit with me, one on one, one at a time, and learn how to search a child’s encyclopedia on the computer. I’d help them form a question, then we’d search for the answer and they’d read it to me. It was fun and my gosh, I’ve never been showered with such love. Those kids were sooooo hungry for any attention at all. This was not a poor neighborhood, either! Not rich, but hardly struggling.
There’s a way to mix the two. But the focus should be on teaching, not technology.