Study: ‘Digital divide’ affects school success

This is an older article that I failed to post at the time, but eSchool News reports on a study that the ‘Digital divide’ affects school success

Having a computer at home increases the likelihood that students will graduate from high school, a UC-Santa Cruz researcher claims in a report that casts the digital divide in a new light. But others question the report’s conclusions.

The report details a number of key findings:

• Teenagers who have access to home computers are 6 to 8 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school than teens who lack access to a home computer, after reportedly controlling for individual, parental, and family characteristics.
• Only 50.6 percent of blacks and 48.7 percent of Latinos have access to home computers, compared with 74.6 percent of whites.
• Only 40.5 percent of blacks and 38.1 percent of Latinos have internet access at home, compared with 67.3 percent of whites.
• Among children, slightly more than half of all black and Latino children have access to a home computer, and about 40 percent have internet access at home. By comparison, 85.5 percent of white children have home computer access, and 77.4 percent can use the internet at home.

  Clearly, as more of our society and economy is tied to the internet, these disparities within different ethnic groups is going to have a greater and greater impact, and will only serve to grow the digital divide.

  This is one of the reasons why citywide municipal networks and muni-wireless networks are even more important, since they provide affordable and universal internet access across an entire city, regardless of the demographics of the local areas.

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