Children and Media

This large-scale study explores how kids age 8 to 18 in the US use media across an array of activities and devices—including short-form, mobile-friendly platforms like YouTube—to see where they spend their time and what they enjoy most. Combined with the data from the 2015 report, the 2019 census gives us a clearer view of how young people's media use has evolved over time.

Ninety-nine percent of America’s schools now have high-speed broadband connections capable of providing enough bandwidth to enable their students and teachers to use technology in the classroom. 46.3 million students and 2.8 million teachers in 83,000 schools have the Internet access they need for digital learning. This success is due to the collaborative effort of governors in all 50 states along with federal policymakers, service providers and school districts.

You may be old enough to remember the “vast wasteland” moniker that JFK’s Federal Communications Commission Chairman, Newton Minow, applied to broadcast TV’s handful of channels in the early 1960s. Well, a new generation of Minow has come up with a label for the new generation of multiplatform video. “Toxic Swamp.”

Two publications released this week have us thinking about the impact the digital divide has on education, schools, and students. In many schools around the country, teachers might be able to take for granted that their students have access to the internet outside of school. Unfortunately, for too many students, that just isn't true. The resulting "Homework Gap" is expanding inequity. 

Bethlehem Area School District Superintendent Joseph Roy thinks that soon, high-speed internet access will be viewed as a basic right. Electricity, running water and indoor plumbing were all once luxuries for the rich, but we cannot imagine living without them today.

In 2018, Common Sense conducted a national survey and focus groups to understand the challenges and promise of technology use in the classroom for learning. Teachers across the US were asked about the use of educational technology with students in their classrooms, and issues of access emerged:

In 2012, 70 percent of schools lacked internet connections fast enough to support basic administrative and instructional needs (100 kilobytes per person), but now only 1.6 percent of school districts fail to meet that low bar. Despite this progress, the Federal Communications Commission is considering changes to the E-Rate program, which subsidizes internet access in schools across the country. The proposal would cap spending and potentially decrease the funding available to schools.

The Federal Communications Commission has resolved its investigation into a couple of Nexstar stations, which follows its dismissal of a retransmission complaint against the broadcaster, which comes in the context of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's circulation of an item approving Nexstar's merger with Tribune. The FCC was looking into whether its KARK-TV Little Rock and KFDX-TV Wichita was meeting its childrens television programming requirements--specifically whether they had filed the requisite quarterly reports. Nexstar will pay a fine of $109,076. 

It’s September and the new school year is underway. Across the country, students are filing into their new classrooms and meeting their new teachers. They are also getting ready for something familiar in education — and that’s homework. What is new about homework, however, is that it now requires internet service. Today, seven in 10 teachers assign homework that requires online access. But data from the Federal Communications Commission, where I work, consistently shows that one in three households does not subscribe to broadband. Where those numbers overlap is the homework gap.