Photograph: Echo/Getty Images/Cultura RF
By Paul L. Thomas, Ed.D. | Originally Published at The Becoming Radical. May 5, 2014
The term “digital divide” is commonly used in education as a subset of the “achievement gap”—representing the inequity between impoverished and affluent students. Both terms, however, tend to keep the focus on observable or measurable outcomes, and thus, distract attention away from the inequity of opportunity that is likely the foundational source of those outcomes.
Currently, South Carolina appears poised to, yet again, make another standards shift—dumping the Common Core the state adopted just a few years ago—but in the coverage of that continuing debate, two points are worth highlighting: (1) “Computer testing allows for a better assessment of both students’ abilities and teachers’ effectiveness….,” and (2) “Democrats say the bill forces the Legislature to spend money on technology in classrooms….,” including “[b]oth the House and Senate budget proposals would spend about $30 million on technology next school year, focusing on rural districts.”
As I have examined before, the educational advantages of technology are at best mixed, technology createsequity concerns as well as outcome disparities (efforts to close the digital divide in schools often increase the achievement gap), and investments in technology are by the nature of technology an endless commitment of precious taxpayers’ dollars.
Capitalism and consumerism are hidden in plain sight in the U.S. Consumerism has a symbiotic relationship with technology in the broader economy and a related symbiotic relationship among technology and the perpetually changing standards movement in education.
In the context of consumerism, then, that technology is perpetually upgrading and that standards (and related high-stakes testing) are perpetually changing are warranted and even necessary: New replaces old, to be replaced by the soon-to-come newer.
But when we shift the context to a pursuit of equity and teaching/learning, technology as a constantly empathyeducates – Consumed by the Digital Divide: