Divided on the digital divide

A recent story in eSchool News reflects two lingering problems. One, there is still a technology divide between rich and poor schools and communities. The other, is there is still a divide among academics about what this means.

Access to a home computer increases the likelihood that children will graduate from high school, but blacks and Latinos are much less likely to have a computer at home than are whites... The report also found that the so-called "digital divide" is even more pronounced among children than adults.

Thus concludes Robert Fairlie, associate professor of economics at UC Santa Cruz. Among the implications:

teenagers who have access to home computers are 6 to 8 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school than teens who lack access to a home computer, after reportedly controlling for individual, parental, and family characteristics.

The article then quotes Hugh W. Glenn, an online editor and research consultant who has taught in the Graduate School of Education and Psychology at Pepperdine University, taking Fairlie to task.

The only way truly to measure the impact of home computer access on student achievement is to "select random groups of whites, blacks, and Latinos and provide members of all groups with laptops for home and school use throughout an academic year. Taking into account any initial disparities among groups, at year's end, all participants could complete selected standardized tests, and a statistical test could determine any significant difference in achievement among the groups."

The article concludes with Glenn adding, "Computers and the World Wide Web [merely] deliver instruction--just as teachers and streamed media do."I do not know if the "merely" was his word or if it was used for editorial convenience as suggested by the "[ ]" but it is a telling denigration.

Since it is still early in the life of this blog, I have not yet explored my ambivalence about technology that I hinted at in my blog description. I do worry about multiple digital divides: Fairlie's, but also the divide created when technology substitutes for real experience. Without getting too far afield from the ESN article, let me say that share glenn's apparent reluctance to drink the technology Kool-Aid. Money pours into school technology to add digital bells and whistles to factory-style education while our children lack essential emotional and intellectual skills. If we see computers as merely another medium to teach to the test, we are indeed wasting our money, for in the end we will have gained nothing.

If we use computers to manage our lifelong learning, weigh diverse opinion and information, and contribute our own knowledge to society, we will have succeeded in doing what public education (at least the education goals of progressives) set out to accomplish: create a citizenry capable of participating in a democracy, and cultivate the creativity that drives innovation and resulting national prosperity. To the extent that we bridge the home computer divide to build a better functioning society I am all for it. If we only hope to teach the right answers then we have misused the technology.

Update 1/4/05: Here are digital divide statistics for Ohio.

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