Unfortunately, too often the message we send low-income and less-educated parents is that screen time is going to help their children. Fifteen years ago, when I was a Big Sister to a girl who attended one of Brooklyn’s worst middle schools, her mother was given strict instructions by teachers to purchase a faster computer as soon as possible to get her daughter’s grades up. Today, thanks to lucrative contracts with school districts, tech companies are happy to bring screens into the classroom and send them home.
But there is little evidence that such programs are helping students. Take Maine, which guarantees a tablet for every student. According to NPR, “at a cost of about $12 million annually,” the state “has yet to see any measurable increases on statewide standardized test scores.”
When politicians and policymakers talk about kids and technology, it is usually about “bridging the digital divide,” making sure that poor kids have as much access as wealthier ones. But there is no evidence that they don’t. According to a 2015 Pew report, 87 percent of Americans between the ages of 13 and 17 have access to a computer. For families earning less than $50,000 a year, that number is 80 percent. As for a racial divide, Pew finds that African-American teenagers are more likely to own a smartphone than any other group of teenagers in America.
These facts have not been allowed to get in the way of the shiny-new-things approach to learning. In 2014, New York received a half-million-dollar grant to lend internet hot spots to low-income families. According to the Urban Libraries Council, such lending programs are “the latest buzz.” Similar programs have begun in Chicago, Seattle and St. Paul, with funding coming from Google and other companies.
But no one is telling poorer parents about the dangers of screen time. For instance, according to a 2012 Pew survey, just 39 percent of parents with incomes of less than $30,000 a year say they are “very concerned” about this issue, compared with about six in 10 parents in higher-earning households.
Make no mistake: The real digital divide in this country is not between children who have access to the internet and those who don’t. It’s between children whose parents know that they have to restrict screen time and those whose parents have been sold a bill of goods by schools and politicians that more screens are a key to success. It’s time to let everyone in on the secret.
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