Education Week - June 4, 2020 - 6

NATIONAL SURVEY DATA

What percentage of your students share devices with parents, siblings,
or other family members and/or friends in order to complete their
schoolwork during coronavirus?
25% or less low-income students
51% to 75% low-income students

26% to 50% low-income students
More than 75% low-income students

59
53

27%
24
17

14 13

20 22

5
No students
sharing devices

1-10% students
sharing devices

quisition of more than 200,000 new devices and continual professional development focused on e-learning.
Officials of the Florida district say it allowed them to hit
the ground running during the current crisis.

11-50% students
sharing devices

More than 50% students
sharing devices

*Results show responses from teachers and district leaders.

eration of devices will be significantly higher than it was
before the pandemic. The 55,000-student Boston public
schools, for instance, purchased 20,000 new laptops in
March to try to make sure that all students in the district
had access to learning during the school building closures.
The competition to get those laptops was intense.
"Everybody is fighting for them," Mark Racine, the district's chief technology officer, said at the time. "We had
some districts reach out to us and say, 'Can we buy some
off of you?' "

6. Educators see greater access to 1-to-1
computing improving teaching and
learning.
Seventy-three percent of district leaders and teachers
responded in the EdWeek Research Center survey that
they believed when school buildings reopen, greater access to 1-to-1 computing will make high-quality teaching
easier. Just 4 percent said they thought it would make
teaching more difficult.
But the problem is that without sound professional
development to show educators how to integrate mobile
learning devices into instruction, the mere presence of
those devices in classrooms is unlikely to improve teaching and learning and could actually hurt it, research
shows. That is why schools will be hard-pressed to put
together PD programs over the summer to ensure that
educators make good use of the availability of more digital learning devices.
For instance, long before the coronavirus forced schools
into throwing together remote learning strategies, MiamiDade County district officials were steadily ramping up
the use of technology over the past six years as part of a
"Digital Convergence" initiative. It has included the ac-

6 | EDUCATION WEEK | June 4, 2020 | www.edweek.org

7. Big tech-equity issues persist for
students and could get worse.
The shift to remote learning has revealed a digital divide in American society and education that is much
worse than many people realized. Those equity problems
showed up in the survey research in many ways.
One of the more practical equity pictures the survey
data showed was how much more difficult it is for students from families living in poverty to have access to
digital devices to do schoolwork at home than their
wealthier peers.
District leaders and teachers from school systems
where more than 75 percent of students quality for free
or reduced-price lunches reported that more than half
(59 percent) of their students had to share digital devices
with parents, siblings, and other family members and/
or friends in order to complete their schoolwork during
the school building shutdowns. That figure is more than
double the percentage for district leaders and teachers
from school systems with 25 percent or less of their students living in poverty.
Home access to high-speed wireless internet services is
also a big challenge for students living in poverty.
"It's not the time to be timid," said Federal Communications Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, a long-time
proponent of more aggressive federal efforts to eliminate
disparities in access to high-speed internet, in a statement. "We have the authority right now to extend the
reach of broadband and close the 'homework gap' so we
connect millions of children who desperately need to get
online for school."

8. Some teachers lack high-speed internet
connections, too.
More than a quarter of U.S. homes don't have broadband internet service, according to a Pew Research Center report from last year. District leaders, especially those
who serve a high percentage of students from low-income
families, have said technology access is a major challenge
during these extended school shutdowns.
But it's not just students without access to the internet-
it's also their teachers.
While only 4 percent of teachers don't have high-speed
wireless access at home, according to the EdWeek Research Center, it's particularly a problem in rural areas,
where broadband internet service is spotty, expensive,
or nonexistent.
"Educators are now assumed to have devices and internet access and unlimited data to do their job, and [in some
cases], they don't," said Cheryl Bost, the president of the
Maryland State Education Association.

http://www.edweek.org

Education Week - June 4, 2020

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