2 minute read
We need to talk about the digital divide in our schools
Rosie Clarke, Editor, SchoolNews, editor@school-news.com.au
The most clicked headline on our School News newsletter this month read, ‘Teachers less likely to take phones away from white, privileged children’.
It sparked a conversation about how the funding disparity between public and private schools in Australia impacts education technology use across the curriculum.
The article in question was penned by US and French researchers, Emeline Brulé and Matt Rafalow, who found that predominantly white private schools viewed social media and video games as potentially useful to education while mostly working and middle class, multi-racial schools perceived it as irrelevant and at times even hostile to learning.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), 96.9 percent of higher income families (at the highest quintile) are much more likely to have home internet access than lower income families. Just 67.4 percent of families at the lowest quintile have home internet access. Regional Australians also have less access and wealthier Australian families tend to have more devices at home too. These findings have significant ramifications to education, where devices are increasingly required for homework, class work, projects and the internet is now essential to almost all educational activities.
The statistics prompted researchers from RMIT University and the University of Canberra to criticise investments made in the National Broadband Network for exasperating this “digital divide”. They wrote to The Conversation: “Instead of a digital economy designed for everyone, we appear to have created a highly stratified internet, where the distribution of resources and opportunities online reflects Australia’s larger social and economic inequalities.”
When the Rudd government delivered basic laptops to all Year 9-12 students, it was deemed an investment in digital education but also unsustainable. Bring your own device (BYOD) schemes soon launched to fill gaps but quickly posed their own problems. Students whose parents can buy higher powered laptops have clear advantages over those with older, basic models. Students whose families can’t afford to buy devices at all rely on donations or borrow from their school or library. A classroom of children working on different systems present unique issues for teachers. Even when schools try to mandate software, such as a referencing program or Microsoft over Apple, it’s difficult to reasonably enforce. Tablets are cheaper than laptops, but they are no longer considered suitable for most secondary school learning.
To be at the forefront of education, schools need to be at the forefront of technology and that is difficult to do without an extensive budget.
Moreover, as project-based learning gathers momentum, technology holds more weight. A student with access to a gaming computer, high-speed internet and the full Adobe suite at home simply has advantages over those who don’t. Likewise, schools with laser-cutters and 3D printers can offer students opportunities that other schools cannot. When we talk about a digital divide, we are talking about a wealth divide that already existed, but technology has worsened.
Digital technology informs future careers: gaming is a billion-dollar industry, politics lives on social media and climate change requires tech-innovation. It is becoming desperately apparent that students without access to digital tools are increasingly disadvantaged in Australia.
