Digital Equity

• From Digital Access to Digital Equity: Critical Barriers That Leaders and Policymakers Must Address to Move Beyond “Boxes & Wires”: This report urges leaders and policymakers to address five critical barriers to digital equity, moving beyond a sole focus on internet access and devices. These barriers include digital redlining, the digital use divide, privacy taxes, adult bias, and ethical concerns.

• EdTech Systems Guide: The guide examines specific considerations that edtech leaders may address when developing and strengthening systems to ensure that edtech is effectively chosen, powerfully implemented, and properly evaluated for effectiveness and equity.

• Evaluating Edtech Tools: ​​This strategy describes methods that leaders can use to decide whether an edtech tool is worth the investment.

• Conducting an Edtech Inventory: An essential step of building equitable edtech processes is to first take stock of what edtech tools already exist in the school system, who is using them, and how they are being used. This insight helps leaders gather and share information to understand their systems.

These additional resources provide additional technical guidance to further support your digital equity initiative:

• 2024 National Education Technology Plan: The most recent update frames three key divides (Digital Access, Digital Use, and Digital Design) limiting educational technology's transformational potential to support teaching and learning. It offers concrete recommendations for state, system, building, and classroom leaders as well as examples from all 50 states.

• Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Education: The U.S. Department of Education Office of Educational Technology’s policy report offers insights and recommendations to address the clear need for sharing knowledge, engaging educators, and refining technology plans and policies for AI use in education.

• K-12 Leaders’ Guide to Successful Technology Integration: Created by Digital Promise as part of the Verizon Innovative Learning Schools program, this guide helps districts create equity-focused school cultures that sustain the integration of one-to-one technology, support teachers in leveraging technology, and ensure that students have powerful learning experiences.

• Supporting Students & Families in Out-of-School Learning: This toolkit created by the Consortium of School Networking discusses five strategies schools and districts can implement to address the homework gap and four steps school leaders can take to collaborate with local governments and other community leaders.

• Privacy Jump-Start Guide: Project Unicorn produced this three-page starter guide to help foster conversations around protecting student data and privacy and to provide access to a number of different resources.

• Delivering on the Promise of Digital Equity: Digital Promise released this whitepaper to help state and local community leaders find innovative and effective ways to invest resources in K-12 education to increase digital equity across nine "big plays" in three critical focus areas.

• Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Computer Science Education Framework: Developed by the Kapor Center, this framework builds on decades of theory and research on culturally relevant and responsive pedagogy across disciplines to define six core components of culturally sustaining, equitable, and inclusive K-12 computer science classrooms.

Quick Links From This Guide:

Although the pandemic has shined a spotlight on the issue of digital equity, researchers have been describing the ongoing disparities for over three decades. Over time, reports have shifted from addressing the digital divide, to the homework gap, to the digital use divide. As you read different reports, think about: how they frame the issue of digital equity; how they offer evidence to support your digital equity initiatives; and how you might carry ideas forward into your context.

• Bridging Digital Equity and Culturally Responsive Education in PreK–12: Leveraging Pandemic Pedagogy to Rethink the Status Quo: After conducting a roundtable conversation with digital equity and culturally responsive education experts, New America produced this brief to frame conversations that extend beyond the issue of digital access.

• Closing the K-12 Digital Divide in the Age of Distance Learning: This four-part series was produced by Common Sense in collaboration with Boston Consulting Group and the Southern Education Foundation. From describing the state of the homework gap at the start of remote learning to making recommendations to state and district leaders, this series of reports details the challenges of learning while disconnected during the pandemic.

• Creativity in Learning: This national report produced by Gallup and sponsored by Apple highlights the challenge of the digital use divide. Despite widespread technology access in schools, teachers and students report that its use rarely includes transformative, creative projects. Of note, students and teachers who attend schools that receive Title I funding reported far fewer creative opportunities than their more affluent peers, often citing lack of access as a barrier.

• Current Perspectives and Continuing Challenges in Computer Science Education in U.S. K-12 Schools: Produced by Gallup and sponsored by Code with Google, this report presents findings from a survey to understand student perceptions of and access to computer science. While parents, principals, and superintendents overwhelmingly reported that computer science should be an integral part of K-12 education, students expressed less interest.

• Digital Equity in the Time of COVID: Student Use of Technology for Equitable Outcomes: This brief, created by the Metropolitan Education Research Consortium (MERC), an alliance between the School of Education at Virginia Commonwealth University and systems in Richmond, examines research related to students’ active use of technology. The report found persistent inequities based on race, gender, language abilities, socioeconomics, and other contextual factors.

• Equity in Online Learning: This research article from Mark Warschauer and Tamara Tate of the UC Irvine Digital Learning Lab presents a framework to conceptualize the equity concerns that emerged during the pandemic’s shift to emergency distance learning. It discusses the equity issues related to students having sufficient internet access and computers, the digital skills needed to successfully engage in online classes, and the challenges teachers faced, given their previous exposure to professional learning that would allow them to effectively conduct classes online.

• Learning at Home While Under-connected: Lower-Income Families During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Conducted in the spring of 2021, this report presents the results of a nationally representative phone survey of households with school-aged children and income levels below the national median. Although rates of device ownership and internet access have increased, respondents reported that this access was far from sufficient or reliable to meaningfully engage in work or learning. At the same time, despite the challenges of remote learning, many parents reported gaining a greater understanding of their children as learners and stronger relationships with their children’s schools.

• Moving Forward: Closing the Computer Science Learning Gap: Created as a companion piece to the report above, this resource focuses specifically on students in rural communities. When asked whether they had interest in computer science, or access to computer science classes, rural students reported both less interest and opportunity.

• Students of Color Caught in the Homework Gap: Sponsored by the Alliance for Education, this report analyzes data from the 2018 American Community Survey conducted for the Alliance for Excellent Education, National Urban League, UnidosUS, and the National Indian Education Association. Of note, it includes an interactive map to provide a better understanding of the availability of internet access in each state.

• The Digital Lives of African American Tweens, Teens, and Parents: Innovating and Learning with Technology: Though several years old, this was one of the first national studies of technology use among African American teens and their parents. The research found that African American teens do not adhere to gender or racial stereotypes about computer use. However, they are less likely to have been exposed to formal opportunities to learn topics such as coding and less likely to learn about computers through informal sources such as classmates or peers.

The Learning Accelerator is grateful for the many individuals and organizations whose contributions made this project a reality. In particular, we thank the following individuals for their guidance, insights, and resources.

• Hali Larkins, former TLA Intern and Impact Fellow at the Office of Educational Technology, current Learning Experience Designer at Amazon

• Susan Bearden, former Director of Digital Programs for InnovateEDU and Co-Author of the 2024 NETP

• Teshon Christie, Chief of Digital Transformation & Innovation at Highline Public Schools

• Diane Doersch, Senior Director at Digital Promise

• Matthew Hiefield, Digital Instructional Materials Coordinator, Digital, Oregon Department of Education

• Dr. Nicol Howard, Dean & Robert A. & Mildred Pernonia Naslund Endowed Dean’s Chair in School of Education at University of Redlands

• Ken Shelton, Digital Equity and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Expert

This resource is offered to the field through a CC-BY Creative Commons License. Suggested citation is as follows: Holland, B., Larkins, H., Rabbitt, B., et al. (2024). Digital Equity: A Guide for School & System Leaders. The Learning Accelerator. Portland, ME.

Do you have your own stories and resources to share? Have questions? Contact the team at info@learningaccelerator.org.