The Great Divide

Closing the gap between technology haves and have-nots

By Andrew Trotter

Andrew Trotter is an asociate editor of Electronic School.

More cyberkids come to school every year. You know the type--those students who one-up just about any technology you provide in the classroom or computer lab. They bring in color-laser-printed term papers--researched at home via the Web--and turn up their noses at the computers you purchased just last year. "These aren't PowerPCs?" they ask, or "You've only got Windows 3.1?"

Yet other youngsters remain silent when their peers chatter about the amount of RAM on their home PC and their latest downloads from the Internet. These students seem happy just to get some time on a computer, even one of the monochrome Macs at the back of the computer lab. Unlike cyberkids, they depend on school for all their experiences with information technologies.

Such differences pose a dilemma for teachers like Jeff Fishbein. When the Blizzard of 1996 shut down the Arlington, Va., schools for a week in January, Fishbein saw an opportunity to harness the technologies he knew were in some of his students' homes. He telephoned youngsters in his American Studies class who he knew subscribed to America Online (AOL) and organized an on-line review for his weekly test. As a result, in a week when schooling for most youngsters was literally snowed under, 13 seventh-graders at Williamsburg Middle School spent three evenings in an on-line "chat room," typing questions into their home computers and reading Fishbein's replies. The sessions kept Fishbein's testing schedule on track--and now he goes on-line with students every week to review for tests and to discuss group projects.

You might applaud this teacher's enterprise in harnessing his students' home computers and on-line hookups. But is it fair? Fishbein says the great majority in his classes--which total 90 students representing "fairly diverse socioeconomic" circumstances--don't subscribe to AOL, which requires a computer, a modem, and a $10 minimum monthly fee. Instead, he encourages them to visit friends who do subscribe and hands out transcripts of the Q&A sessions--which, he adds, are strictly optional. Fishbein also expects a half-dozen more students to join AOL soon.

Fishbein's dilemma is familiar to any teacher who exchanges e-mail with students and their families, recommends software titles to parents, or urges students to surf the Web on weekends: Americans are buying PCs by the millions, but educators who take advantage of those resources for learning risk widening the gap between technology haves and have-nots.

To be sure, federal and state officials--from California to New Hampshire--aim to narrow that gap with a clutch of initiatives in the planning stages or just under way. At the federal level, President Clinton in February called for a $2 billion program to increase the technology available to all students. But the funding and direction of such bold plans is far from certain--while market trends steadily force the chasm wider and deeper.

The home computer divide

Market researchers have been scrutinizing America's latest romance with technology and finding it in full bloom. A study last fall by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, in Washington, D.C., found that 42 percent of families with children at home have a "home computer user." Among families with annual incomes above $50,000, more than three out of five have a computer, the Pew Center found. The study says 24 million Americans use a home computer daily for personal or work-related tasks.

Lower computer prices and user-friendly features should keep families buying more than five million PCs a year, industry analysts agree. In fact, some analysts cited last fall by Business Week expect the increase in home PCs to continue until it "hits a wall" at about 65 percent of homes around the end of the decade.

All these home machines aren't just stand-alone boxes either. The Pew Center reports that 18 million U.S. homes have computer modems, up from 11 million with modems in 1994. Twenty-one percent of the families with children at home also have CD-ROM capability. And as of last June, nearly 12 million Americans subscribed to an on-line service, such as AOL or CompuServe--up from five million in the winter of 1994. Another two million households connect to the Internet directly, the study found.

As family members become techno-literate at home and at work, they are coming to regard computers as an important tool for education. "Learning is now a primary driver" for family PC buyers, a FIND/SVP survey reports. And no longer are computers just "appliances of the well-educated and the affluent," says the Pew report: Households that have acquired a PC within the last two years "are more likely to be middle income, not as highly educated, and younger than those who purchased them more than two years earlier."

All those developments probably intrigue you and other technology-minded school leaders. Schools have made real gains in adding computers to classrooms and labs--averaging one computer for every 11 students in 1994-95, up from one computer per 125 students in 1983-84, according to Quality Education Data (QED). But that achievement fades a bit when you realize that, according to QED, 27 percent of school computers are Apple IIs and other all-but-obsolete models. And though half of all schools have at least one computer linked to the Internet, according to the U.S. Department of Education, few have the wiring and services to exploit the Net effectively. What's more, the aggregate figures mask glaring disparities between high and low-income school districts, as chronicled vividly by Jonathan Kozol in Savage Inequalities. But no school district, it can safely be said, has all the computer power it needs or wants.

That's where all that home technology could come in handy, some educators acknowledge. "A lot of technology at home would be the envy of schools," says Jesse Rodriguez, technology director of the Tucson Unified Schools.

But how can educators tap home resources effectively--and without giving some students unfair advantages over others? In July, a study of 54,000 U.S. households by the U.S. Department of Commerce documented the dearth of computers in poor households: In rural areas, only 4.5 percent of households with an annual income under $10,000 have computers, according to the study, which is based on government census data; 8.1 percent of poor households in metropolitan areas have them, as do 7.6 percent of those in inner cities. Approximately 20 percent of poor households--rural, metropolitan, and inner-city--don't even have telephone service, the study reports.

Computer ownership also varies considerably by race. According to the Pew Center study, only 9.5 percent of black families own computers, and just 12 percent of Hispanic households own them. In comparison, 28 percent of white households and 36 percent of Asian and Pacific Islander families have computers.

An order of magnitude

Some educators regard home technology as no different from other advantages of the affluent--such as travel and well-educated parents. But others believe a home computer and on-line access provide a special opportunity to extend learning into the evenings and to modernize communication between working parents and teachers. Such an advantage could be crucial to disadvantaged children who struggle academically.

Studies by Henry Jay Becker, an education professor at the University of California at Irvine, indicate that children from low-income families tend to use computers in less-sophisticated ways than children from high-income families. While the differences in high school might be due to the "tracking" of students into classes that use computers differently, Becker says, "at the lower grade levels, it's partly a family-opportunity thing--that is, the kids [who] have [computers] at home, use them; and the kids [who] don't, don't."

Deborah McGriff, senior vice president of the Edison Project, says children need two levels of exposure to computers. First, they need to develop a general facility so the computer "doesn't get in the way" of computer-based assessments and simple activities. Then, they need a second level of skill that involves "higher-order activities," she says. And that's where children who lack a home computer might suffer: "There is a recognition, as with styles of teaching and levels of critical learning, that poor kids are not exposed to computers at the level of sophistication that other kids are," says McGriff, a former superintendent of the Detroit city schools.

If that exposure gap is not bridged by adulthood, many students will be at a lifelong disadvantage, say experts on workplace issues. Labor economists agree that the winners in an increasingly technological world will be the adults with gut-level command of technology. "The real world isn't drill and practice," McGriff says succinctly.

The current design of the Edison Project--developed over three years at a cost of $40 million--includes giving schoolchildren from all economic backgrounds intensive exposure to computers by putting the machines in their homes. The controversial for-profit company--led by entrepreneur Christopher Whittle and former Yale President Benno Schmidt Jr.--abandoned its original ambitions to open 200 private schools by 1996. Instead, implementation at the first four schools--public elementary schools in Boston; Wichita; Mount Clemens, Mich.; and Sherman, Texas--began just last summer.

But observers generally are impressed with the schools' progress to date. In January, the fifth-graders at Dodge Elementary School (K-5; enrollment 610) in Wichita were the first Edison Project students to receive the standard-issue home Macintosh Performa computer with a color monitor, CD-ROM drive, modem, and software tools, including a digital encyclopedia. More than 75 percent of the students at the neighborhood school receive federal lunch assistance; 34 percent are minorities. (By press time, all but 50 Dodge students had received home computers.)

The home computers are to be part of a modern communications system that will be integrated into the life of each school. Students will receive "a lot of the individualized instruction they need" via the home computer, McGriff says. They then spend their hours at school "engaged in social interaction with the teacher or a group." Next year, the students' home research capability will grow, she says, when Edison gives them access to the Internet. The company has not revealed the size of its investment in home technology, but clearly Edison is betting a great deal that it will make a difference in learning.

Help from a Buddy

Even if your district had the deep pockets that Edison apparently has, you might resist a similar gamble. Most districts have a technology agenda ambitious enough for their own buildings. But if you're looking for one of the best demonstrations of how schools can tap computer power in homes while overcoming equity concerns, McGriff and others point to Indiana's Buddy Project. (See the sidebar for a discussion of another home technology experiment, in Union City, N.J.)

More than 6,000 Indiana families have been beneficiaries of the Buddy Project, which was launched in 1988 by the nonprofit Corporation for Educational Technology (CET), in Indianapolis. Fourth-graders take home a computer, printer, modem, and a variety of software that they may use until the end of the fifth grade (or in some cases through the sixth grade). Students and parents are trained in basic computer skills and software tools. Teachers also receive home computers and are trained to act like coaches instead of lecturers and to provide assistance and activities for the entire family. Buddy sites can also access an on-line repository of educational materials and activities. (The project doesn't provide access to the Internet, says CET President Alan Hill, because of fears of potential liability should students use it inappropriately.)

For Indiana school districts that are selected for the program, state grants support a full-time Buddy coordinator/trainer and a large chunk (currently about $900) of the cost of each home computer. The district must find the rest, set up and run a network to link the computers, and provide a classroom computer for every five participating students.

An extensive evaluation of the Buddy Project in 1995 by San Francisco research firm Rockman et al. concluded that participating students made significant gains in writing and communication skills compared with other students in similar circumstances. Students with a computer at home spend more time on schoolwork--and less time watching television--the study found. Although the researchers saw no quantitative differences in the mathematics skills of Buddy students, compared with other students, they concluded that the Buddy students enjoyed math more and were better motivated to pursue interdisciplinary projects.

But the Buddy Project is not just about academic performance, participants say; it affects the community climate. Steve Gookins, superintendent of the Jac-Sen-Del School Corp. (K-12; enrollment 950), says the program has been a tonic to his community--an agricultural region where at least 30 percent of the families live in poverty. Gookins started the district's Buddy site in 1990 and has since joined CET's board of directors. Gookins says Buddy "was the first program I have encountered in my 25-plus years in education where it didn't matter what race, gender, household, and socioeconomic level a student came from: Every child got the same opportunity."

Gookins--like officials in other districts--reports broader effects on the families of Buddy Project participants. For most of the households, the Buddy computer is their first: "We got technology to people who never would have dreamed of having a computer," Gookins says proudly. In some cases, family incomes have increased after parents and siblings learned computer skills at Buddy training sessions, school officials say.

CET President Hill says, "There certainly is not enough money today at the state level . . . to buy a personal computer for every child at home." But the organization has negotiated discounts for software and persuaded local banks to offer Buddy Project families low-interest loans for the purchase of a computer (often when their children have finished fifth grade).

Discounts help, but Hill and others believe computer prices must drop much further before all families can be provided with--or purchase--a home PC. Some think the solution will be low-cost home terminals that lack a PC's power but can browse the Internet and borrow powerful features from public networks and servers. Another for-profit partner to schools--the Lightspan Partnership--is introducing into students' homes set-top boxes that turn television sets into interactive machines for educational programming and communication. The full-scale plan requires the community to have a sophisticated telecommunications network; current pilot tests use CD-ROM devices to deliver the programming.

Last fall, the Capital School District, in Dover, Del., became one of 25 Delaware schools to receive a grant to work with the Lightspan Partnership. Superintendent Joe Crossen says that after a successful pilot test last spring, the district wanted to participate, "first, to get technology into the hands of more children, and second, because of the potential for a network and the ability of parents and teachers to communicate." Forty percent of the district's children are low-income, Crossen says. The district also has the highest percentage of minority children in the state, at 44 percent.

Crossen says providing learning technologies at home helps the district address "an ongoing concern" about inequities in school computer use: Students who are able to complete their seat work quickly can spend more class time using a computer, compared with less able learners, who are more likely to be from disadvantaged backgrounds. The result, too often, he says, is that "if you're a slow learner, you don't have technology at home, and you're last to use it in school."

Powerful schools

Schools don't have to be in generously funded partnerships or go after grants to help local families acquire home technologies. A group of four elementary schools in Seattle, for example, has begun collecting used computers from local corporations and distributing them to students' families.

Rachel Neumann of the Powerful Schools Coalition, which is made up of staff members, parents, and community members of the schools, says that in November the coalition gave 35 donated IBM 286 computers with dot-matrix printers to families of students in a mentor program and to low-income adult volunteers who work in the schools. For a second give-away, in March, the Boeing Corp. donated 30 computers with the more modern 386 processor. These machines were loaded with a popular word processor, a reading game, and the electronic version of the Jeopardy game, Neumann says.

To receive a computer, the parents were required to take six hours of hands-on training. And project organizers asked teachers to give the children assignments to complete on their home computer. In a survey of parents after the first give-away, Neumann says, "almost everyone said [his or her] children were using [the computers] at least four hours a week."

Educators who know technology, however, know that just providing home computers isn't enough. Technical and organizational issues abound--depending, of course, on how ambitious your project is. You need a robust (read "very expensive") district network, for example, to integrate home and school computer environments and to run multimedia software. You must plan to cope with compatibility issues and the different and changing levels of technology at home and school. Also essential is teacher training, which few districts are able to provide in the large amounts recommended by experts.

Another concern raised by some observers, including University of California researcher Henry Becker: Home technology might divert schools from making needed investments in their own classrooms. But project organizers who spoke with Electronic School argue that the benefits are great when schools enlarge their sphere of responsibility to include families. They speak of parents overcoming their fears of technology, getting new or better jobs as a result of learning computer skills, and becoming more active as school volunteers.

Best of all, they say, parents get more involved with their children's school lives when they understand the technologies their children are using. MIT researcher Sherry Turkle, who has studied the culture of computers for more than 20 years, says, "The more [parents] are not intimidated, the more they're personally involved, the better." Turkle, the author of Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (Simon and Schuster, 1996) adds that a grasp of technology is necessary if parents are to supervise their computer-literate children effectively.

As you weigh whether to pursue a home technology connection, consider this: Technology might not only help schools connect with families--it might also help parents reconnect with their children.