Ensuring Equity

One of the greatest fears of those who are skeptical about the potential for technology to help reinvent schools is that it will benefit only rich schools and will therefore widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots. But information technologies can transform education for any student. Already, in a handful of inner city schools around the country, students are riding the Internet to access information and talk to students throughout the world. They are participating in science experiments with tens of thousands of their peers. They are managing imaginary stock portfolios using information from Wall Street. They are working with desktop publishing programs to put out school newspapers and collections of their poems and short stories.

Many of Americans bad dreams and scariest future scenarios stem from a single and terrible fact: this nation has a vast and disenfranchised underclass, drawn most shamefully along racial lines, and whose plight we are dangerously close to accepting as a simple fact of life, a permanent feature of the American landscape. What we are discussing represents nothing less than this nationUs last and best hope of providing something like a level socioeconomic playing field for a true majority of its citizens. --William Gibson, Author

The problem is that for the majority of disadvantaged schoolchildren, such a transformation is nowhere in sight. It is not that poorer schools do not have computers; almost all schools in the United States now have some computers. But without the funds to maintain hardware and upgrade software, computers sit broken down in closets and computer labs. Without the resources to train teachers, computers are unwelcome interlopers in the classroom. Without the prod of a standards-based curriculum, computers tend to be used not for creative exploration but for drill and practice work, which is more likely to frustrate students than it is to inspire them.

It would be tragic if the selective application of technology in education were to widen the inequities in American education, because in other spheres the personal computer has been a powerful democratizing influence. Personal computers distribute capabilities from central locations to the machines on each individual's desk. They greatly increase the individual's ability to communicate, to learn, to work. They have helped undermine tyrannies, such as when personal computers and faxes were used both during the Tiananmen Square uprising and in the declining days of the Soviet Union to transmit information to the outside world.

What is wonderful about computer is being independent instead of being coddled all the time, like a baby in arms, because of my blindness. It feels like being coddled like a baby sometimes, because everybody wants to help.
-Janice Ware, Student

Technology may well play a pivotal role in allowing native people to sustain a cultural present and build
a cultural future that
our cultural past deserves, indeed demands.
-Richard West, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian

Information technologies can also preserve the traditions that make communities strong. Consider the "virtual museum" now being built by the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian. A student in New Mexico will be able to call up on a computer screen an image of an artifact stored in the museum, rotate the image, read the curator's text describing the piece, and then send a question to the curator. Huge libraries of film and photographs will be accessible from the archives. The museum's network will allow Native Americans to communicate with each other, take classes, or read the latest postings from Native American news sources.

Government has an important role in ensuring access to new technologies. It can pay for hardware for disadvantaged schools, educate teachers, link all schools to computer networks, and disseminate information about useful hardware and software. Access will also increase as computer prices drop and computing becomes even cheaper and more ubiquitous.

We must make sure that
the information highway does not bypass our urban
centers like other transportation systems once did. To do so would disable yet another generation of
educators and yet another generation of students.
-Warren Simmons, National Center on Education and
the Economy

But government cannot ensure equity. Only a commitment by the public and by all levels of the educational system can do that. Society has a great interest in enabling all its citizens to participate in the economic and social mainstream. Technology offers one of the most powerful means available for breaching the barriers of class, race, and income that divide Americans.

Technology can also provide greatly increased opportunities for another group of disadvantaged Americans: people with physical disabilities. Technologies that allow disabled students to interact with computers can dramatically level the educational playing field. Hardware and software are now available that can translate written words into speech for the blind or allow paralyzed individuals to enter words into a computer. New speech systems can recognize and convert spoken words into words on a computer screen. By enabling the disabled to attend regular schools, work at jobs, and participate more fully in society, these systems are both tremendously fulfilling for the people who use them and cost-effective to society as a whole.

Through recent history there have been two views of technology. The first sees technology as available predominantly to the economically advantaged. The second sees technology as a means of lowering barriers between the financially well off and those less economically fortunate.

History suggests that the latter is most often the relationship of technology and society. Major technologies deployed today, such as the airplane, saw early acceptance by those with financial resources, but increasingly and especially in recent decades have become much more available, as evidenced by the wide use of air travel. Electronic technologies more than any in the past have spread rapidly at much lower costs. Today games played by children are purchased and played across all socioeconomic groups.

Though poor neighborhoods and families face daunting challenges, technology deployed in education can help remove inequities between the schools of the inner city and the suburbs, between cities and rural districts, and inequities faced by people with physical disabilities and by Native Americans. Technology can become the force that equalizes the educational opportunities of all children regardless of location and social and economic circumstance. This should be the national goal.