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Rethink the digital divide

The idea of a digital divide – where access to smartphones, tablets, laptops and the Internet is determined by how much money families have – has dominated a lot of the debate about students and these emerging digital tools. It was the focus of a conference the Gates Foundation organized in 1999 and emerged as a key section in Bill Clinton’s 2000 State of the Union Address where he asserted: “Opportunity for all requires something else today — having access to a computer and knowing how to use it. That means we must close the digital divide between those who’ve got the tools and those who don’t.” Clinton went on to argue for a big investment in connecting classrooms and libraries to the Internet. Under President Obama, this focus on closing the digital divide shifted to the home, with a big push “to help Americans from across the country, at every income level, get online and have the tools to take full advantage of the Internet.”

But what if the true digital divide is not students’ access to these tools but how they use them?

That’s the striking conclusion from a new study by researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of South California published by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute. When the pandemic school closures forced students to stay at home, there was a big push to expand access to high-speed Internet into the homes of school-aged children so they could continue their learning online. The assumption was that all students would benefit from this broadband access. But that’s not what these researchers found.

“Broadband program participation boosted remote learning engagement and achievement for previously high-performing students and reduced engagement and achievement for low-performing pupils,” they write. “We conclude that increased technology access may come with greater costs for low-achieving students and benefits for high-achieving ones – contributing to widening pandemic-era educational inequities.”

You read that right: closing the digital divide in broadband access made the learning divide worse. 

While students that are already ahead may be motivated to use these tools to accelerate their learning, for many others who have fallen behind, high-speed Internet is just a faster path to a world of digital distractions. 

We wouldn’t expect that giving every kid in America a free Xbox or a Netflix subscription would help them learn more. We might even predict that all but the most disciplined students would learn less. Yet, we are often misled by the general purpose nature of digital devices—and the examples of high-performing students using them in the pursuit of knowledge—and turn a blind eye to how distracting they can be. It is increasingly clear that the academic value of digital tools is entirely dependent on the choices students make in a world that is constantly tempting them to make the wrong ones.  

As Mike Bloomberg wrote last week in a column calling for schools to rethink their use of technology: “The soaring promise of technology in the classroom has failed to deliver results while imposing great costs on children and taxpayers … One study found it can take students up to 20 minutes to refocus after engaging in a nonacademic activity. Put another way: Playing one video game three times a day costs an hour of learning. Some of the online diversions that students find involve disturbing and inappropriate content that slips through schools’ filters, warping developing minds.”

That means education advocates need to think much more deeply about the true impact of digital devices and be clear-eyed about who is benefiting and who is being harmed. As the University of Chicago and USC researchers conclude in their study: “Continued investments in expanding technology access without complementary supports for vulnerable students may further fuel these inequities; counterbalancing the negative effects of technology for low-achieving students is thus imperative.”

Stand up for a family’s right to know

Standardized tests used to be a key element of a bipartisan education agenda but lately they have been more of a bipartisan punching bag. 

Maybe what it takes to appreciate their value is to remove them for a few years and see what happens? That’s what Harvard University did in their admissions process starting in 2020 and the results have been a predictable disaster.

“The Harvard Math Department will pilot a new introductory course aimed at rectifying a lack of foundational algebra skills among students,” S. Mac Healey and Angelina J. Parker write in an article for The Crimson. The remedial algebra course is designed to address deficiencies in “students’ math skills and learning abilities” that have prevented them from being able to handle the material in Harvard’s traditional introductory math course. It’s shocking that Harvard has had to offer a course for the first time in its history to cover material most college-bound students master in the 8th grade. In fact, after a little digging we realized that Harvard was testing for algebra skills on its entrance exam all the way back in 1869. This story of the damage done by breaking that 151 year old approach to assessing students’ skills has resonated with a huge number of people over the past week on social media.

The biggest question people have asked is: How does a school that accepts less than 4 percent of its applicants now have so many classrooms full of students that can’t do middle school math? 

A new report published by NBER provides an answer. It turns out that in an era of grade inflation, social promotions and AI-fueled cheating, “standardized test scores predict academic outcomes with a normalized slope four times greater than that from high school GPA.” In other words, there is no reliable way to catch these deficiencies looking at high school grades alone.

Key Resources

Harvard’s Marty West argues in an essay in Education Next that the only way students are going to fully catch back up is if we find a way to get them extra instructional time.

In a new study by UVA researchers published by EdWorkingPapers, the authors find that for the 2020-21 school year in “only 7 percent of the year was spent in the fully in-person learning modality for the average Virginia district” and “districts serving larger concentrations of Black and Hispanic students offered less in-person learning.”

Five years after the initial school closures, Brookings finds that only 8% of states have recovered from Covid-era learning losses in math and only 16% have recovered in ELA.

On the New York Times’ podcast The Daily, Michael Barbaro speaks to Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, the authors of a new book that argues the school shutdowns and other pandemic lockdown policies did not result in any measurable number of lives saved and came at an enormous cost to students and their families.