Bridging the digital divide
Public schools work to close the gap.
Will Congress and President Bush support their efforts?

Students peered inside a steel box, mounted on a computer lab wall at Martin Luther King elementary in Miami, and looked at what appeared to be nothing more than a knot of cables, wires and electrical clips. Not so, explained teacher and AFT member Alfred Thomas. What these students were really looking at is opportunity.

The electrical box is home to newly installed network connections that would allow Internet access in every classroom at Martin Luther King. Located in Liberty City, a low- to moderate-income neighborhood in Miami, Martin Luther King serves hundreds of students who either will get access to 21st century technologies through their school or they won't get it at all.

"The students we get are mostly disadvantaged, with a few middle-class families," says Thomas, a 26-year classroom veteran who grew up about 15 blocks from Martin Luther King. "I doubt very seriously that many of these students have any chances to use computers or the Internet outside school. You have to build these new skills or it's definitely going to put them at a disadvantage later in life."

Martin Luther King and other public schools in Dade County, Fla., have put a premium on erasing the trend that threatens to separate different income, ethnic and racial groups into technology "haves" and "have-nots"--the so-called digital divide. Not only has the nation's fourth-largest school system embraced new technologies, it also has expanded access in pursuit of a specific goal--higher student achievement.

There is a real concern that lawmakers in Washington may stymie--or even reverse--the gains that schools like those in Dade County have made in closing the digital divide. It's not clear whether the Bush administration and an evenly split Congress will be able to agree on a school modernization program like the one the Clinton administration strove to achieve. Without needed repairs and upgrades, many school buildings, particularly those in urban areas, will lack the infrastructure needed to provide students access to the Internet and other new technologies.

In addition, some in Congress have long opposed the E-rate program, which has been credited with helping connect 1 million public school classrooms to new and improved telecommunications networks. Authorized as part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the E-rate provides discounts of 20 percent to 90 percent on telecommunications and Internet services to K-12 schools nationwide--with the greatest discounts targeted to schools and libraries serving disadvantaged communities.

The AFT fully supports federal legislation that would help school districts fund school repairs; the union also wants the continuation of the popular E-rate program and other measures aimed at closing the digital divide.

Tough comparisons

Last October, the U.S. Department of Commerce released the fourth in its series of reports entitled Falling through the Net: Toward Digital Inclusion. It illustrates that the nation is making big strides to close the digital divide, but there are still stubborn inequities when it comes to access.

On the positive side, black households are now more than twice as likely to have home access to Internet than they were just 20 months ago, rising from 11.2 percent to 23.5 percent. Internet access in Hispanic households also has nearly doubled and stands at 23.6 percent. But those gains are overshadowed by what's happening in the nation as a whole. The share of households nationwide with Internet access rose to 41.5 percent in August 2000--up from only about one in four households only 18 months earlier. At the highest end, more than three out of every four families earning more than $75,000 have home Internet access. "The phenomenal growth that has taken place in the availability of computing and information technology tools [must be] tempered by the realization that there is still much more to be done to make certain that everyone is included in the digital economy," the report stresses.

Today, the gap in Internet access between black households and the nation as a whole stands at 18 percent--3 percent more than in December 1998. And the gap between Hispanic household access and the national average is 17.9 percent--3 percent more than it was in 1998. "A digital divide remains or has expanded slightly in some cases, even while Internet access and computer ownership are rising rapidly for almost all groups," Falling through the Net authors conclude.

Schools are showing similar trends--stubborn inequities in a generally improving picture. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that public schools with Internet access in 1999 rose to 95 percent, up from 35 percent just five years earlier. And, for schools serving high-poverty communities, Internet access grew from 19 percent in 1994 to 90 percent in 1999. A large part of the gain came courtesy of the federal "E-rate" program.

So is it time to declare victory? Not if the goal is student Internet access, rather than school Internet access. In 1999, almost three-quarters of instructional rooms in wealthy schools (where less than 11 percent of students receive federal lunch assistance) had Internet access. For high-poverty schools, only 39 percent of rooms had access. That gap has actually widened over five years. Also widening in the last two years is the student-per-computer ratio. In high-poverty schools, the current ratio is about 16 students per computer; in wealthy schools, the ratio is only seven to one.

"It's important for all schools to have access to computers and to have all classrooms wired," says Thomas. "Kids here are eager to go online to find research materials for projects. They write journals on the computer and practice specific skills to get ready" for state assessments in reading and math. "It really does make a difference."

Ramping up

Dade County has made a major, multi-year effort to fight the digital divide. The district is placing at least five Internet-accessible computers in all grade 1-4 classrooms in the district and is upgrading or replacing older computers already in the schools. Major sources of funding include a five-year $30-million initiative aimed at low-performing schools called "Operation Safety Net," federal E-rate funds, Title I, and $15 million in interest-free academic zone bonds backed by the federal government.

"The E-rate has been very helpful to us for finishing the wiring projects in schools or initiating projects," says Chris Master, a technology specialist for the district. Currently, every one of the 310 instructional buildings in Dade is connected to the Internet, and 70 percent of classrooms also have Internet connectivity--impressive figures for a major urban school district. Local, state and federal funds also have trimmed the use of obsolete computers--about 83 percent of all computers used in Dade today are at least "Pentium class," up from 58 percent just a year ago.

The computer-to-student ratio also has dropped in Dade. Today there is one computer for every seven students in the school system, and the district is still committed to a goal of four to one, Master says. "As an urban school district, we know a majority of our students will only find access to computers through our schools."

One of the schools benefiting from the new investment in technology is Coral Way Elementary, the nation's first bilingual school. Marta Speckmaier, media specialist for the past 11 years at Coral Way, says, when it comes to technology, "the school has gone from nothing to pretty much everything," including new wireless stations that allow portable classrooms to have Internet access. It was not an easy project by any means, the AFT member stresses. Like many other older school buildings, rewiring Coral Way involved asbestos-abatement concerns common to older buildings.

"It seems as if everything we've been doing for the last five years is kicking in, and you can see it in [students'] ability to use the Internet and go online," says Speckmaier. "The major benefit [of the technology investment] is that it makes things run more efficiently, which makes it easier for me to teach," and it gives students more access to information; using appropriate search engines, they see how we're connecting with other people around the world.

Sharon L. Roper, a fourth-grade teacher at Van E. Blanton Elementary in Miami, says expanded access to technology in the classroom has made a big difference for students at the school, 95 percent of whom qualify for federal lunch assistance. "Before, there was nothing that I had in my classroom except an encyclopedia. Now, the children can go to the computer and just find what they need" to complete research projects or to practice specific skills tied to state assessments in reading, writing and mathematics. "If they are having trouble identifying the main idea [in a reading passage], I have a program that can work specifically on that."

The bottom line

Five years ago, Dade made a major investment in technology for the 44 schools identified by the state as "failing" based on student achievement. Along with hardware, the school system worked with two venders to develop software specifically aimed at boosting student skills evaluated in the Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test and giving teachers such supports as an onsite technology facilitator and regular weekly school meetings to help teachers incorporate technology into their daily lessons. Today, only two of the original 44 schools are still on the state's list of failing schools.

Roper stresses that it wasn't just technology but technology combined with aggressive teacher support that helped make the difference at Van E. Blanton, which made tremendous progress last year in writing and reading. "The training is very important if you're going to show how computers can be used not just for games but for students to really gain information and find out things they didn't know before."

The district is working in close cooperation with the United Teachers of Dade/AFT to build that comfort level for educators through projects designed to harness technology that helps teachers work smarter. Recently, the union and district teamed up to pilot a new electronic grade book for teachers that is getting rave reviews from the field, reports UTD technology specialist Carl Durnberg. The electronic grade books are eliminating "at least four, and as many as eight, days" of administrative drudgery from teachers' schedules, he says. Parent conferences also are easier to set up thanks to the new technology, which also is boosting parent-teacher communication via e-mail.

The district also has secured grants that can help make it easier for educators to use technology outside school. Teachers who are comfortable with setting up computers for online use can earn a stipend by visiting colleagues' homes and configuring their computers for online use, including access to the district's free e-mail service for teachers. In fact, one of the biggest lessons learned in Dade, Master explains, is that the first step in ramping up schools should always be supporting and training teachers to use the technology.

"We know it's not the 'Field of Dreams'--if you build it they will come," she says.

Related article:
Spanning the divide, one time at a time

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