Technology Access Gap

Abstract

A technology access gap — or digital divide — exists between K–12 students from affluent backgrounds in the United States and those from less advantaged backgrounds. Some believe the technology access gap highlights preexisting racial and socioeconomic disparities in American society. The existence of a technology access gap was first discussed in the 1980s, with the advent of the personal computer, and it became front-page news in the 1990s with the advent of the internet. Experts continue to be divided over whether the technology access gap among U.S. students is growing narrower or wider. Some technology watchers at the beginning of the twenty-first century argue that the true technology gap is a digital generation gap that exists between "digital" students and their "analog" parents and teachers. Others argue that issues such as rural broadband and the spread of computer and Internet technology in marginalized communities should continue to be national priorities in an increasingly competitive global economy where technical skills will be in demand as never before.

Overview

Electronic technology has become a part of everyday life for most Americans. Whether at home, at work, or even at the movies, the digital revolution has transformed the way we live, work, and how we spend our leisure time. Becoming skilled in the use of computer and web-based technologies is no longer an option in the present economy, it is a necessity.

“Technology has been referred to as a 'second language' and those who don't learn this new language are at educational, economic, and social disadvantages. Because technology plays such a large role in modern society, all students need ample opportunities to learn how to use and enjoy it” (Warren-Sams, 1997, p. 2).

With the possible exception of smartphones and similar mobile devices, no technology has been more associated with the digital revolution than personal computers and the internet. Perhaps not surprisingly, some social observers have seen these breakthroughs as a primary means by which to lower the barriers for the poor and otherwise disadvantaged to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the twenty-first century economy. Others — pointing to previous technological breakthroughs such as the airplane, car, and telephone — charged that technology has either been irrelevant to America's social problems, or worse, has served to perpetuate and deepen them. In the context of access to technology by K–12 students, critics charged that the onset of computers and the internet created a severe technology access gap between privileged and underprivileged students. These critics insisted that this technology access gap has resulted in many poor and minoritized students remaining stuck in the same cycle of poverty and despair that engulfed their parents and grandparents.

History. This investigation of the technology access gap began in the 1980s, when computer technology had advanced to the point where more and more Americans were buying personal computers. Popular models such as the Apple IIe, the Apple Macintosh Plus/SE, and various IBM PC clones began to transform how students and their parents lived and worked. Educational software began to proliferate as increasingly powerful computers found their way into public school classrooms. Students put aside their typewriters, an innovation of a previous century, and began to use the new machines for typing school papers.

In the early 1990s, the internet began to transform education. Using the internet, students were able to tap into a global community — a "worldwide web" — of teachers and learners to expand their educational horizons. The reach of the worldwide web quickly expanded across the educational landscape: While only 35 percent of public schools were wired in 1994 (Wells & Lewis, 2006, p. 4), the number climbed to 99 percent by 2009 (Gray, Thomas & Lewis, 2010). Moreover, the ratio of students to internet-enabled computers dropped from 12.1 to 1 in 1998 to 1.7 to 1 in 2009, meaning that more and more students had easier access to the Internet at school (Wells & Lewis, 2006, p. 6; Gray, Thomas & Lewis, 2010). Faster broadband connections provided quicker access to web-based information; only 3 percent of wired schools were using slower dial-up technology by 2010 (Fox et al., 2012). However, the 2010 Federal Communication Commission survey of schools receiving federal technology funding found that almost half of respondents said that their school’s connection was a mere 3 megabits per second (Mbps), slower than that recommended for home access (cited in Fox et al., 2012).

These statistics formed the backdrop for an important and ongoing discussion among politicians, educators, and parents about access to technology. In the early 1990s it wasn't entirely clear that technology would quickly become available to virtually all children, regardless of race or socioeconomic status. Some observers at the time were so alarmed at what they perceived to be a widening technology access gap that they petitioned the federal government for a redress of grievances. By the end of the decade, a series of government reports highlighted what researchers saw as a widening technology access gap between upper-class and middle-class students on one hand and the lower socioeconomic status peers on the other. Sanger (1999) summarized a 1999 government report in the New York Times:

“A new Federal survey shows that while minority groups are increasingly gaining access to computers and the Internet, the racial divide remains stark, with blacks and Hispanics less than half as likely as whites to explore the net from home, work or school. The study, the third and most comprehensive to be conducted by the Commerce Department over the past three years, reinforces the fear that minority groups are increasingly at a disadvantage in competing for the hottest entry-level jobs in the country: those that require a knowledge of computers and comfort in navigating the Internet” (Sanger, 1999).

Clausing (1999) cites the director of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration at the U.S. Department of Commerce, Gregory L. Rohde, as recognizing disturbing trends in technology access that need to be reversed (Clausing, 1999). Critics argued, too, that the digital divide in America was only a subset of a larger global technology access problem that exists between those in the developed world and those in the developing world, particularly Africa.

However, according to Carvin (2006), while the federal government was issuing such dire reports, poorer schools were catching up:

“In 1996, about two-thirds of public schools had Internet access, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. By 2003, virtually every public school could go online. Perhaps even more striking, high-poverty schools, as well as their low-poverty counterparts, could boast near-universal access to the Internet by that point” (Carvin, 2006). Later data have born this out too: in 2009, 94 percent of high-poverty schools (those with 75 percent or more students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch) had web-enabled instructional computers available, either in class or that could be brought into class (Gray, Thomas & Lewis, 2010).

Access in Homes & Schools. Private schools and homeschooling families also took advantage of the internet beginning in the 1990s. By 1998, 67 percent of all private schools had internet access, and among Catholic schools, the number rose to 83 percent (NCES, 2000, p. 2).

According to overall numbers published by the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of American homes with Internet access also kept pace. Access increased from 26.2 percent of homes in 1998 to 54.6 percent in 2003, but in homes with children aged 6 to 17, the 2003 number was 67 percent (U.S. Census Bureau, 2007). These numbers continued to grow, with 77 percent of households using the internet in 2015 (Ryan & Lewis, 2017).

By 2023, Internet inaccessibility for Americans had shrunk but still stubbornly persisted. According to the Wilson Center, almost a quarter of all Americans did not have access to broadband in the home. This situation is more pervasive in rural areas. This lack of broadband existed in 40% of schools and 60% of healthcare facilities in non-urban locations. The impact of Covid-19 school closures resulted in remote learning being inaccessible to 10 million K-12 students. A racial component to the digital divide remained as well. Nearly 50% of the homes in the United States without an Internet connection were Hispanic or African American households.

Warren-Sams (1997) noted that the digital divide was not inevitable. He showed that researchers and practitioners alike recognized the inequitable distribution and use of computers and other technologies:

• Appear at all educational levels
• Occur among districts as well as within and across schools
• Often result from inattention
• Endure indefinitely without planned interventions

He documented these inequities in research carried out over fifteen years.

“The present system for funding public education presents a formidable barrier to equal educational opportunity in technology. Districts and schools will continue to experience substantial differences in the financial and educational resources available to them. However, educators with a commitment to equity have done and can do much to lessen or overcome financial and other barriers” (Warren-Sams, 1997, p. 2)

After years of such "planned interventions" by educators, politicians, corporate America, and parents, by at least some objective measures, the digital divide shrank.

Others were not so confident that the work of closing the digital divide — either at home or abroad — has been finished. Online clearinghouses such as the Digital Divide Network provided a home for those who believed more work needed to be done before children of all races and socioeconomic levels can reap the benefits of the information age.

In 2022, members of Purdue University introduced a metric they labeled “the Digital Divide Index (DDI). Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau, researchers developed a quantitative method to depict the Digital Divide. In addition, they developed heat maps that could more visibly demonstrate the locations of these disparities. Researchers began by dividing the fifty states into their respective 1,063 counties. Using several variables, researchers categorized these counties by the disparities among the populations regarding Internet connectivity. A low DDI indicated a smaller gap between haves and have-nots. A higher score suggested a greater divide. The data revealed DDI scores were impacted by location (urban versus rural), racial composition, and other factors such as income, disabilities, education, and employment.

Further Insights

Digital Generation Gap. By 2007, Andrew Trotter, a technology reporter at Education Week, was confident enough in the trends to conclude that the digital divide was no longer the main issue for American public schools, since electronics prices had dropped and families were more motivated to purchase new technology. Rather, he argued, the real focus should be on what he called the digital generation gap — the divide between children and their parents and teachers in familiarity with the latest information and communication technologies. The digital generation gap presented a challenge to parents and teachers because neither group is as familiar with emerging technologies — or uses them as much — as their children/students.

Even as early as 2002, before the rise of online social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, Levin and Arafeh could paint a coherent picture of the tech-savvy student:

“The students who were most striking to us, however, were those who were the most Internet savvy. Many of these students have been online for five or six years already; they are technologically literate; and they maintain multiple email addresses and instant messaging (IM) identities. While online, they frequently are multitasking: conducting research for a paper, printing an online study guide for a book they are reading, downloading music, instant messaging simultaneously with dozens of friends, emailing other friends, and preparing a PowerPoint presentation for class the next day. While they may not be online hours every day, these students rely heavily on the Internet for school and their social lives. The teen survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life [Project] suggests that perhaps 30% to 40% of teenagers fall into this Internet-savvy category. They represent a large and growing cohort of technologically-elite students” (Levin & Arafeh, 2002, p. 4).

What's changed since 2002 is that these tech-savvy students have gotten even younger, thus presenting the same challenges for middle school and elementary school teachers as their high school counterparts presented less than a decade ago.

The digital generation gap has also given rise to fears that incessant and highly targeted multi-platform marketing campaigns are reducing students' ability to discriminate between marketing spin and true information about the world. For example, in reading, Sine notes that teachers must not only give students "new strategies for scanning diverse media" (print and online), but they must also help them in "extracting meaning across media types" through "critical reading skills to determine the value of content" (Sine, 2003). Technology writer Andrew Keen (2007) has argued that the rise of user-generated — and often anonymous — content on the Internet (most notably on Wikipedia) has sown confusion regarding what web surfers should regard as trusted sources of information.

Experts agree that in order to address the digital generation gap, teachers must work with young people to better understand the technologies that are winning their hearts and minds. Only then will teachers be able to understand how their students learn and adapt their teaching methods accordingly — sometimes by embracing technology trends in the classroom, and sometimes by helping students think more critically and carefully about how they use technology and the ways in which it impacts how they think and act.

Free & Open Source Software in Education. Historically, software has been proprietary, meaning that its underlying code cannot be modified or improved by teachers or students. Producers of this proprietary (or closed-source) software require school districts who want to use their software to purchase it, and then they charge for support, upgrades, and enhancements. Proprietary software includes Windows- and Apple-based operating systems, as well as many word processors, spreadsheets and educational programs.

With roots stretching back to colleges and universities in the 1960s, a radically different vision for software emerged in the 1990s. Leaders of the free and open source software (FOSS) movement argued that software — including educational software — should be free to use and free to modify according to local needs. This argument has had immediate resonance in the developing world, where governments are at pains merely to feed their populations.

Projects like the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative aim to bring the power of low-cost Internet connectivity to millions of the world's poorest children, including those who live on less than one dollar per day, through massive technology sales to national governments. The laptops provided by the OLPC — over 2.4 million of which were in use as of 2013 — run only on open-source software.

Where U.S. schools are concerned, a significant advantage to FOSS software is that it typically runs on less-powerful computer hardware than proprietary software, which reduces or even eliminates the need for cash-strapped school districts to upgrade their existing equipment. Instead, those resources can be spent elsewhere. "FOSS is finding greater acceptance in education for many reasons," writes Justin Riddiough of the news site SchoolForge, "the primary being the intersection of dwindling budgets and the need to provide the best software and educational resources available" (cited in Hoover, 2007). And given the increasing popularity of free Linux-based operating systems such as Ubuntu and openSUSE, which run well on legacy computer equipment (equipment that is two to four years old), many students should be able to use their school's existing computer hardware to complete their web-based coursework using a web browser and free office suites such as OpenOffice.

The Organization for Free Software in Education and Teaching and the Free Software Foundation's Free Software in Education project are helping to raise awareness of alternatives to proprietary educational software programs. Websites such as SchoolForge provide news and other resources to educators using (or considering the use of) FOSS in educational contexts.

Rural Broadband. The most well-reported technology access gap has been the one that exists between students of different races or socioeconomic levels. But there has been less reporting on the digital divide between urban and suburban students on one hand and rural students on the other. As broadband Internet access was rolled out across the United States, it spread first to urban areas, where providers could reap a fast return on their infrastructure investments, then to suburban areas, and then, much more slowly, to rural areas, which have a significantly lower population density.

Statistics from 2006 show that while the gap in overall Internet access was closing, rural Americans still trailed considerably behind their urban and suburban neighbors when it came to the broadband Internet access needed to deliver high-quality audio and video:

“By the end of 2005, 24% of rural Americans had high-speed internet connections at home compared with 39% of adult Americans living elsewhere. In 2003, 9% of rural Americans had broadband at home, less than half the rate (22%) in urban and suburban America. For overall internet use — by whatever connection from any location — the penetration rate for adult rural Americans lagged the rest of the country by 8 percentage points at the end of 2005 (a 62% to 70% margin). This is about half the gap that existed at the end of 2003” (Horrigan & Murray, 2006).

Though broadband access has expanded everywhere, the gap between rural and urban households has persisted. By 2012, 98.4 percent of rural US households had broadband coverage, versus 99.5 percent overall in the United States (Yoo, 2014, p. 3). Rural broadband expansion has been assisted by federal action such as provisions in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which allotted $7.2 billion for improvements to the nation’s information infrastructure.

Viewpoints

Is There a New Kind of Digital Divide? While it is beyond dispute that virtually all U.S. public school students have access to computers and the Internet in school, a debate has erupted regarding whether school-based technology access is enough to ameliorate the variety of social, political, economic, and cultural problems that have long sustained a yawning gap between rich and poor in America. Put another way, is it good enough for students to have access to technology and the Internet at school when that learning isn't reinforced at home?

This was the research objective of a group of researchers from the U.S. and Germany (Beltran, Das, & Fairlie, 2006). After noting "large and persistent disparities in access to technology across racial, income and other demographic groups," they provide more detail:

“For example, estimates from the 2003 Current Population Survey (CPS) indicate that roughly one half of all African-American and Latino children and less than half of all children living in families with incomes less than $30,000 have access to home computers. In comparison, 85 percent of white, non-Latino children and 94 percent of children in families with incomes greater than $60,000 have access to home computers. If home computers are an important input into the educational process then disparities in access to technology may translate into future disparities in educational and economic outcomes. Financial, informational and technical constraints may limit the optimal level of investment in personal computers among some families” (pp. 2–3).

These numbers have improved significantly since 2003; for example, Horrigan and Smith (2007) reported that from 2005 to 2007, the percentage of African American adults with a home broadband connection went from 14 to 40 percent, and Smith (2014) reported a figure of 62 percent for 2013, while Ryan and Lewis (2017) reported a figure of 64.5 percent for 2015. However, 79.3 percent of non-Hispanic whites and 88.5 of non-Hispanic Asian Americans had broadband Internet in 2015, so the gap, although narrowing, remains.

Closing this home computer and Internet gap becomes even more important when one considers that access to computers and the Internet at home can enhance the benefits of their use at school. Beltran, Das, and Fairlie (2006) reported just such a correlation:

“Teenagers who have access to home computers are 6 to 8 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school than teenagers who do not have home computers after controlling for individual, parental, and family characteristics. We generally find evidence of positive relationships between home computers and educational outcomes using several estimation strategies, including controlling for typically unobservable home environment and extracurricular activities ... fixed effects models, instrumental variables, future computer ownership and ‘pencil tests.’ Some of these estimation techniques, however, provide imprecise estimates. Home computers may increase high school graduation by reducing non-productive activities, such as truancy and crime, among children in addition to making it easier to complete school assignments” (p. iii).

A related question for future research will be whether the stunning popularity of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, even in poor and rural areas, is helping or harming efforts to close the digital divide that runs through American neighborhoods. Will students learn useful technical skills only when accessing educational material on the web? Or will the "softer" skills they're learning — such as multitasking and efficient written communication via text-messaging — also equip them to enter the twenty-first century workforce?

Terms & Concepts

Digital Divide: A common catchphrase used primarily by educators and politicians to describe the differences in access for K–12 students of different classes, races, and ethnicities in the United States.

Digital Generation Gap: A term used to describe the extent to which the computer and web savviness of different generations varies.

Global Economy: A phrase used to describe economic activity on an international and increasingly interconnected scale.

Internet: A shorthand way to refer to a global network of computers, originally designed by the U.S. government, that is designed to share data.

Rural Broadband: A phrase used to describe high-speed Internet access in rural areas.

Technology Access Gap: A phrase used to describe the inequalities that persist in access to new technology, especially computers and the Internet.

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Suggested Reading

Brady, K. P. (2012). Technology in schools. Sage Publications. Retrieved October 16, 2014 from EBSCO online database eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=525927&ebv=EB&ppid=pp%5FCover.

Breck, J. (2006). 109 ideas for virtual learning: How open content will help close the digital divide. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education.

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Stevens, D. (2006). Inequality.com: Money, power and the digital divide. Oxford: Oneworld Publications.

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Yamagata-Lynch, L. C., Despande, D. R., Do J., Garty, E., Mastrogiovanni, J. M., and Teague, S. J. (2017). Net neutrality and its implications to online learning. International Review of Research in Open & Distance Learning, 18(6), 243–260. Retrieved March 6, 2018, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=125726848&site=ehost-live&scope=site.