Technology & Learning
Community
From the Facilitator
June 1996
Will the Net Increase Inequities
in Access?
by Carol Cross, TLC Facilitator
The use of information technologies, particularly the Internet, seems
to be ubiquitous these days. Businesses, popular entertainment, politicians,
and the media are falling over each other in the rush to get “on the
Net,” which is increasingly seen as a necessary component of one's
survival in the near future.
Even in education, notoriously resistant to technical
innovation, the news about acquiring access to the global informational
resources represented by the Internet seems to be refreshingly aggressive.
At the 1995 U.S. Secretary of Education's annual Conference on Education
Technology, presenters revealed the following statistics:
Half of the nation's
public schools are connected to the Internet, up from 35%
of schools in 1994; Of those schools that do not yet
have Internet access, 75% say they have plans to connect in the
future; By the year 2001, the number of Internet accounts
will equal the total world population.
However, while the total number of Internet accounts
may amount to the world's total population, presenters admitted
that access is far from even: many people hold several Internet
accounts, while multitudes have no access at all. Also, connecting
schools to the Net does not ensure new access to instructional resources;
the conference also reported:
Only 9% of public
schools provide Internet access to classrooms, libraries,
laboratories, or other instructional, rather than administrative,
areas; In 1994, only 2% of all K-12 teachers and 4%
of all K-12 students reported using the Internet heavily for educational
purposes;
Perhaps most frightening for the access-conscious
educators typically found in community colleges is the fact that
public schools with high percentages of students from low-income
families are only half as likely to have Internet access as schools
serving more affluent student populations.
Indeed, it appears that the Internet is exacerbating
the existing disparity in technology access between high-income
and low-income K-12 systems. The Secretary's Conference stated that
schools with high concentrations of students in poverty have an
average student-to-computer ration of 13.9, compared with an overall
national average of 12.2 and a high-income school average of 11.7.
The data also finds that schools with more than 50% minority enrollment
have an average of 14.1 students per computer; those with high numbers
of Hispanic students have an average of 16.4 students per computer.
While such statistics should be of concern to
the entire nation, they are particularly alarming to community colleges,
who are most likely to be the postsecondary recipients of these
technology-restricted students as they move out of the K-12 system.
The latest figures from the American Association of Community Colleges
show that more than twice as many low-income students start their
education at two-year colleges compared to four-year colleges, while
high-income students are over three times more likely to start at
a four-year college than a community college. Minority students
are also more likely to start their postsecondary education at a
community college; for Hispanic students, they are more than twice
as likely to attend a community college as a four-year college.
Obviously, this is an issue that needs to be dealt
with in the public school system, but it is an issue for community
colleges as well. In planning technology resources, community colleges
may find that their upcoming students may be deficient in what is
becoming a new “basic skill” for the 21st century--the ability to
work with information technology, particularly the on-line global
communication resource known as the Internet. Like the remedial
services they already provide, community colleges may have to be
prepared to enable large segments of their student population to
“catch up” with the technological expertise that is required by
the high-skill, high-tech workplace they intend to enter.
Carol Cross,
TLC Facilitator
Want to comment on this article? Send email to cross@league.org.
Originally published in the June 1996 issue of Signals.
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