A new report released by Common Sense Media and the Boston Consulting Group shows that the digital divide between children that have sufficient internet access and those that do not have access is still unacceptably wide. According to the study, between 15 and 16 million K-12 school age children do not have access to “adequate internet or devices to sustain effective distance learning at home.” That’s about 30% of children set to enroll this fall in U.S. schools. Of those, around 9 million have neither internet access nor devices.
But, like everything in the United States connected to greed and poor infrastructure, the digital divide affects more than one essential demographic. The study estimates that between “300,000 to 400,000 K-12 teachers live in households without adequate internet connectivity, roughly 10 percent of all public school teachers, and 100,000 teachers lack adequate home computing devices.”
The study defines “adequate internet connection” as internet with minimum speeds of 25/3 Mbps (download/upload speeds). The digital divide, as with our income inequalities and our justice inequalities, is also marked by racism. According to the study’s authors, “while 18 percent of White households lack broadband, 26 percent of Latinx, 30 percent of Black, and 35 percent of Native American student households lack adequate home internet access. In rural communities, 37 percent of students are without a home broadband connection compared to 25 percent in suburban households and 21 percent in urban areas.”
This problem affects every state across the country. States with the highest percentage of “have nots” in this scenario are predictable: Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama. Mississippi is already ranked among the worst states with the lowest rates of fixed broadband access, and according to this study, half of Mississippi’s student body does not have an adequate broadband connection. But they are not alone. The states with large populations of school children, like Texas and California, top the list of K-12 age school children who are affected by this digital divide, with 1,829,000 and 1,529,000 respectively. That’s about 34% of Texas’ K-12 children and 25% of California’s children.
The study’s authors say that between $6 billion and $11 billion will be needed to bridge this divide for the fall through spring semesters of school if children and teachers are to continue their educations from home. Considering that the Republican Party and some Democratic representatives seem cool with opaquely handing out hundreds of billions to already extraordinarily wealthy corporations, one might think this price tag would be easily legislated. Unfortunately, with our country’s idiotic leadership pretending that there is no COVID-19 pandemic going on, it is going to be a partisan issue all the way up to Election Day.
In fact, the current administration, behind their Republican majority FCC, has done the opposite of trying to ameliorate this condition. Getting private industry involved is also a wonky proposition as handing them carrot after carrot in tax breaks and taxpayer-funded subsidies has not resulted in good-faith expansion of broadband access to low income families. And the digital divide in our country is made up of families that can either not find affordable internet access that meets some basic requirements for robust speed, or they live in areas completely underserved by our monopolistic telecom industry. Many of the families affected by these issues are predictably families that also rely on federal programs like SNAP because of food insecurity issues, and most conservative officials fight tooth and nail to withhold anything they can from people in need of SNAP assistance.
As departments of education across the country try and come up with workable plans for reopening schools, learning from home will be an essential ingredient. Whether full or part time, using video conferencing, referencing materials, and education programs are all things only accessible to households that have adequate broadband internet access—not to mention devices that can access the internet. Our country’s digital divide has already been an issue for millions of children during pre-novel coronavirus conditions, when things like homework and supplemental education materials were the main issue. As with every other issue in inequality in our country, the current pandemic has made the issue of the digital divide that much more stark.
