As school districts around the state and country revert from hybrid in-person to all-remote plans in response to COVID-19 outbreaks, many educators are concerned about our most vulnerable students who are more likely to have trouble with virtual learning because of digital inequality. 

“Low-income students who don’t have access to summer camps and enrichment programs typically back slide two to five months each summer,” said Vikki Katz, an associate professor with the School of Communication and Information (SC&I) at Rutgers-New Brunswick. “We just tacked on easily another six months to that, and we are looking at a whole school year ahead that almost certainly will be heavily disrupted.”

Katz says that after three months of emergency remote instruction this spring followed by two months of summer vacation, teachers are facing a potential avalanche of learning loss this September – especially among low-income students and those who are grappling with learning English. 

“It’s all about the ABCDs of remote learning:  Assistance, Broadband Connectivity, and Devices,” said Katz, who conducts research with children growing up in low-income, working class and immigrant families and how they learn about and with new technology. “Students need all of those bases covered for distance learning to work.”

According to a July survey of 294,429 parents conducted by the New Jersey Department of Education, only 14 percent of parent respondents feel that remote learning has had a positive effect on their child’s education, said Rebecca B. Reynolds, an associate professor within SC&I. Another 41 percent are just moderately confident and 45 percent are not confident of this at all, quotes Reynolds of the state survey results.

That’s likely because the entire educational infrastructure is built on the idea that students can visit a physical space to learn and gain access to resources, said Rutgers–Camden researcher, Jim Brown, an associate professor of English and director of the Digital Studies Center. The pandemic, he said, has shed light on the fact that digital access is not evenly distributed and that publicly available systems – for instance, Wi-Fi at libraries – are resources that many people rely on.

“When students move to remote learning, those systems become difficult or impossible to access,” he said. “This means we need to figure out a way to make sure that everyone, no matter where they live, has high-speed internet access.”

In a grant-funded interview study of digital inequality measures among teachers and students that Reynolds is currently conducting, New Jersey teachers have reported that some families of students in their classes resorted to sitting outside the school in their cars to access the free school-based Wi-Fi because they did not have access at home.

“With more time to prepare, teachers and administrators may be able to remedy some (but certainly not all) of the digital inequality concerns experienced in spring 2020, moving into fall semester, if state and/or district funds are being leveraged to provide devices and home networking connectivity to those who lack these resources,” said Reynolds, who investigates human learning across a range of contexts including online participatory settings. 

However, even if schools can provide laptops and hotspot access, that does not guarantee an adult will always be available and able to assist children using that technology. 

“Those students may encounter other known barriers to access, such as digital literacy and prior experience with technology, motivation to engage with technology and ineffective design of learning resources,” said Reynolds.

This explains why Katz steers clear of using the term “digital divide” to characterize our growing digital inequality and the impact it’s had on our students’ education during the pandemic.

“Divide makes it sound like there are people who have everything they need and people on the other side who have nothing,” said Katz, who prefers to describe it as a digital continuum. “It’s more about how ‘under-connected’ families are than an either/or.”

What about those students who have access to the ABCDs of distance learning? Why did some experience success virtually learning this spring while others did not? 

Reynolds said that’s because educators – with varying degrees of digital literacy – were tasked anew with emergency remote instruction with little time to research how to best design and implement online teaching and learning experiences. Some teachers also lacked their own childcare, which placed significant time burdens on them. 

It was a less than ideal combination, said Reynolds, who coedits Information and Learning Sciences, a journal that has published a special issue on remote teaching and learning strategies offering research-driven guidelines for educators.

The best solution to close education gaps being exacerbated by remote learning, Katz said, is rely on it as little as possible.

Katz, who lives in Manhattan and is hoping her own son will be able to start kindergarten in-person this year, supports those advocating using tents on streets and parking lots, as local restaurants have, in order to allow for open-air classrooms and employing recent college graduates having trouble finding work as aids to foster small group learning.

“None of this is perfect,” said Katz, “but we need to get kids back to meaningful and generative learning environments, not glorified child care or parking them somewhere so parents can go to work.”

But don’t quit there, said Brown. Policymakers need to rethink public education from the ground up, he argues. That means not tying school funding to property taxes, but also undoing the decades-long defunding of public education – in K-12, as well as at higher-education institutions – that has exacerbated inequalities, digital and otherwise.

“If we want to address the inequalities that define our digital lives,” said Brown, “we have to address the deeper, systemic problems that continue to widen the gap between those who can assume systems will be available, accessible and working for them, and those who cannot.”

More information about the Communication Department and the Library and Information Science Department is available on the Rutgers School of Communication and Information website. 

This article was originally published in Rutgers Today on August 25, 2020.

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