Often, I have written, whether in my books (see below) or on this blog about the digital divide and the fact that it is growing rather shrinking. It is truly a dire situation
which all responsible netizens have an obligation to turn around. There
is not a single reason not to do so.
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Bridging a Digital Divide That Leaves
Schoolchildren Behind
By CECILIA KANG FEB.
22, 2016 nytimes.com
McALLEN,
Tex. — At 7 p.m. on a recent Wednesday, Isabella and Tony Ruiz were standing in
their usual homework spot, on a crumbling sidewalk across the street from the
elementary school nearest to their home.
“I
got it. I’m going to download,” Isabella said to her brother Tony as they
connected to the school’s wireless hot spot and watched her teacher’s math
guide slowly appear on the cracked screen of the family smartphone.
Isabella,
11, and Tony, 12, were outside the school because they have no Internet service
at home — and connectivity is getting harder. With their mother, Maria, out of
work for months and money coming only from their father, Isaias, who washes
dishes, the family had cut back on almost everything, including their cellphone
data plan.
So
every weeknight, the siblings stood outside the low-slung school, sometimes for
hours, to complete homework for the sixth grade.
“There’s
just no funds left,” Maria Ruiz said later outside the family’s white clapboard
rental home. “It worries me because it will become more important to have
Internet when they have to do more homework.”
CreditIlana
Panich-Linsman for The New York Times
With
many educators pushing for students to use resources on the Internet with class
work, the federal government is now grappling with a stark disparity in access
to technology, between students who have high-speed Internet at home and an
estimated five millionfamilies who are without it and
who are struggling to keep up.
The
challenge is felt across the nation. Some students in Coachella, Calif., and
Huntsville, Ala., depend on school buses that have free Wi-Fi to complete their
homework. The buses are sometimes parked in residential neighborhoods overnight
so that children can connect and continue studying. In cities like Detroit,
Miami and New Orleans, where as many as one-third of homes do not have
broadband, children crowd libraries and fast-food restaurants to use free hot
spots.
The
divide is driving action at the federal level. Members of theFederal Communications Commission are
expected to vote next month on repurposing a roughly $2 billion-a-year phone
subsidy program, known as Lifeline, to include subsidies for broadband
services in low-income homes.
“This
is what I call the homework gap, and it is the cruelest part of the digital
divide,” said Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democratic member of the commission who
has pushed to overhaul the Lifeline program.
Ms.
Rosenworcel cited research showing that seven in 10 teachers now assign homework
that requires web access. Yet one-third of kindergartners through 12th graders
in the United States, from low-income and rural households, are unable to go
online from home. The Obama administration announced in July its own program to help address the
problem, deploying free and affordable broadband into public housing.
The
Lifeline plan has drawn strong criticism from the two Republicans among the
five F.C.C. commissioners, and from some lawmakers, who say the program, which
was introduced in 1985 to bring phone services to low-income families, has been
wasteful and was abused.
In
2008, when the commission added subsidies for mobile-phone services to
discounts for landlines, some homes started double-billing the program, and the
budget for the fund ballooned. Various investigations, including a government
review in early 2015, questioned the effectiveness of the phone program and whether
the commission had done enough to monitor for abuse.
But
advocacy groups for children and minorities have backed the F.C.C. plan, saying
it will be important in preventing students from falling further behind their
peers.
“For
young people, broadband is like the air we breathe,” said James P. Steyer,
chief executive of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit group known for its reviews
and age-based ratings of videos, websites and books that has campaigned for the
changes in Lifeline. His organization earns licensing fees from Internet
service providers that may stand to gain from the expansion of the F.C.C.
program.
“It’s
essential for school and future job opportunity,” Mr. Steyer said. “So it is
desperately important that we make broadband affordable for low-income families
and minorities, because we can’t be a society of haves and have-nots.”
Few
places better illustrate the challenges faced by students without broadband
than McAllen, in South Texas, and the surrounding area in the Rio Grande
Valley. Poverty rates in the region are high. In some towns, as many as 40
percent of households have no access to the Internet, among the lowest access
rates in the country, according to a 2014 study by the National Digital
Inclusion Alliance.
Brigida
Castro, who lives in a concrete home off a one-lane road in the town of Donna,
said the main local Internet provider had told her it could not bring service
to her street. Her daughter, Perla, 16, is a junior at a high school in the
South Texas Independent School District geared toward directing students into
medical professions. The school district has put Wi-Fi on more than 100 school
buses to help students who do not have access at home, and Perla relies on
school bus rides — nearly three hours a day — to finish homework.
“I could go home on a shorter bus route, but I
want to get A’s,” Perla said.
Marla
M. Guerra, superintendent of the school district, said that it had little
choice but to require more technology in class work, even though many families
did not have broadband access.
“We
try to accommodate those without access in every way we can,” she said, “but we
can’t hold back on our use of technology in the classrooms because we have to
prepare our children for the world that is waiting for them.”
In
McAllen Independent School District, which has 33 schools and 25,000 students,
each location runs wireless hot spots 24 hours a day so that students can sit
in parking lots or crouch against school walls to do homework into the night.
Some
municipalities are trying other solutions. The city of Pharr, with the help of
the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, has proposed using local tax funds to bring
Internet service to all homes and to put free hot spots around town.
But
the biggest boon would be the Lifeline overhaul.
“This
is a population tailor-made for this F.C.C. plan,” said Jordana Barton, a
community development director for the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “Lack of
broadband has inhibited their ability to participate in the economy, and over
and over, what I see is the homework divide that is keeping children behind.”
Teachers
do their part to help. In the McAllen school district, an eighth-grade math
teacher, Sandra Guerra, recently chatted online with six students who were stuck
on a problem about polynomials. She sent them a digital photo of the equation
and detailed steps to solve the problem.
The
next morning, knowing some students had no Internet at home and were working
off worksheets she had prepared for them, Ms. Guerra started class with a
review of the problem that had troubled other students the night before.
“I
have 50 minutes with them in class, and I can’t cover everything in that time,
so the learning continues when they are home and they can go online,” Ms.
Guerra said.
Not
every teacher is as understanding. Yunuen Reyes, 17, a high school senior in
Pharr, does not have Internet at home and typically has three hours of homework
a day that require research and collaboration with classmates online. Some
assignments and take-home exams are due by midnight and must be submitted over
the web.
So
after her shift working at the drive-up window of a Chinese restaurant, Yunuen
scrambles to find Wi-Fi at a nearby Starbucks or at fast-food restaurants.
Often, she goes to the home of a friend who lets her use the family computer
and Internet connection. Recently, she got a C on an English assignment that
she had not completed before the deadline to submit it online.
“It’s stressful and embarrassing to keep
asking my friend,” Yunuen said. “I don’t want to keep bothering her. But I also
don’t want my teachers to think I’m making excuses.
=============================
For a great satire on email, please see the following:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTgYHHKs0Zwscoop_post=bcaa0440-2548-11e5-c1bd-90b11c3d2b20&__scoop_topic=2455618
===============================================
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