Unequally disconnected: Access to online learning in the US

A new weekly Household Pulse Survey from the US Census Bureau offers a rich opportunity to quantify the impact of COVID-19 on children’s education during this time. It includes questions about the availability of digital devices and the internet in homes across the US, which allow us to explore the concern that access to distance learning is out of the reach of many of the most vulnerable students. Based on four weeks of data, our findings are bleak:

• Around 1 in 10 of the poorest children in the US has little or no access to technology for learning. 12.2 percent of respondents from households earning less than $25,000 a year said a digital device was rarely or never available for a child to use for learning and 9.8 percent said the same of the internet.
• Poor children living in poor states are even more likely to be at a disadvantage. Across the U.S., 4.3 percent of households earning less than $35,000 per year say a device is never available for a child’s learning. For the same income bracket in the five poorest states, this jumps to 6.3 percent, while in the five richest, it drops to 1.6 percent. Median incomes in Mississippi are just over half of those in Washington (DC) which means, among other things, less tax revenue available for digital infrastructure or services designed to even out inequities driven by wage differences.
• Nine in 10 children of employed caregivers have access to both a device and the internet for learning always, or most of the time. This on demand availability drops around five percentage points for children living in households where caregivers are unemployed.
• Fully 26.5 percent of children living in homes where there is often not enough food to go around—more than 1 in 4—are rarely or never able to get online to learn.

The data shine a light on two major issues administrations in the U.S. must confront as they start to plan for the new academic year. First, extra support will be critical for students whose family circumstances have made it difficult or impossible to continue learning during the pandemic. This means supporting teachers with tools to diagnose students as well as with the materials and pedagogical approaches to serve the learning needs of what is certain to be an even wider range of student skills. Second, it will be important to plan for further periods where children need to learn from home for public health reasons, or where it may not be possible to have all students in classes and maintain appropriate social distancing. Some communities may need to adopt policies such as giving preferential access to school-based learning for the most disadvantaged, since more privileged students will be better equipped to study online. It also means designing and resourcing initiatives to improve poor children’s access to technology, either through equipment loan programs, capital investment in better internet access in relevant neighborhoods, or both.