September 08, 2006
The National Center for Education Statistics has just released a new report on the school-home digital divide. It's been a while since the US government has released a report about the digital divide, let alone use the term "digital divide," so it's interesting to see them paint such a stark picture of the technology gap that exists between well-to-do and underprivileged students. On the plus side, the research suggests that Internet access in school is indeed equitable, with little difference among students in terms of gender, race, disability. The same thing applies to the income and education levels of their parents - low-income children with poorly educated parents are just about as likely to use the Internet in school as high-income peers with well-educated parents.
Unfortunately, this equity vanishes the moment you leave the schoolhouse gate. I blogged about the statistics in detail over at PBS learning.now, so here are some of the highlights:
At home, 78% of white students have Internet access, which isn’t enormously different than the percentage with access at school. In comparison, only 46% of African American students, 48% of Latinos and 43% of Native Americans had access at home; Asian-Americans and mixed ethnicity students fared better at 74% apiece. Regarding disability, 68% of non-disabled students and 55% of disabled students had home access.ruck by the fact that the report uses the term "digital divide" so freely - more than a dozen times in the whole report. By using phrases like “There is a ‘digital divide,’” the report seems to go against the last five years of federal government officials not using the term. Does it signal a sea change? My guess is probably not. Perhaps the Secretary of Education may pepper it into a speech but that'll probably be the end of it, unless the media and the blogosphere rally around the report's findings and make a big deal about it. -andyParental education and income levels also reveal a stark divide at home. While a whopping 88% kids whose parents achieved a graduate-level of education had home Net access, the same was true of only 55% of kids whose parents completed high school - and only 35% of kids whose parents didn’t. If parents speak just Spanish at home, only 32% of kids had home Internet access, compared with 69% of kids whose parents spoke English. Lastly, 88% of kids whose parents earned more than $75,000 a year had home access, compared to just 37% of kids whose parents earned less than $20,000 a year.
