Conclusion

Students’ unequal access to broadband and digital devices has concerned policymakers for years, prompting the Obama administration’s ConnectEd initiative in 2013 to connect every classroom to broadband internet. The Federal Communications Commission then brought attention to the “homework gap” between students who do and do not have internet connectivity in their after-school hours.¹ The COVID-19 pandemic shifted the focus to what digital access children and families have at home, when schools, libraries, and other community locations that many families depend on for Wi-Fi and computer access suddenly became unavailable.

This report details survey findings about the experiences of lower-income families with preschool and school-aged children during the pandemic, with a look back and a look forward. Parent reflect on a uniquely challenging year, how being under-connected complicated their lives, and what they learned. They also look forward to what their children will need in the months and years to come, as our nation moves beyond the acute phase of the pandemic.

The survey findings raise three calls to action for policymakers, educators, and educational media producers:

#1: The “under-connected” represent millions of families. Policymakers should make them a priority.
To fully diagnose digital inequality, we must do more than ask yes/no questions about access to broadband internet and digital devices. Our analyses comparing 2015 and 2021 survey data show that while access to broadband and computers has increased dramatically—and encouragingly, especially among the families that were least likely to have broadband and computers in 2015—the proportion of families whose internet connections and devices are unreliable or inadequate has hardly changed at all.

Of course, even the basic indicators of access show that much work remains to be done. One in seven families in our 2021 survey still does not have broadband internet access, and one in eight does not have a computer. And when we home in on children ages three to 13 whose family incomes are below the federal poverty level, or children with immigrant Hispanic parents, these challenges are even more pronounced: one in four of these children still lack home broadband access a full year into online learning. The challenge for policymakers, educators, and internet service providers is to reach these young people with affordable, long-term options for broadband connectivity and devices as soon as possible.

But an even tougher challenge awaits: reducing the number of families with school-aged children who are under-connected, because their internet connectivity or digital devices are inadequate or unreliable for the tasks that family members rely on them for. We found that a majority of lower-income families that have home broadband access still experienced service that was too slow or had been interrupted due to unpaid bills in the past 12 months. Likewise, a majority of families with a computer at home said that the computer did not work properly or that there were too many people who needed to use the device for them to have the time on it that they needed.

The consequences of being under-connected were painfully clear in this pandemic year. Our survey finds just how disruptive being under-connected was for being able to consistently participate in remote learning. Data collected by the Pew Research Center over a year ago, in April 2020, showed that lower-income parents felt their students were likely to experience disruptions.² Our survey shows that those disruptions in fact came to pass. And Pew was not alone in predicting such challenges; in June 2020, a majority of Latino parents surveyed by Abriendo Puertas and Latino Decisions reported that they would need better or more reliable internet to support their children’s remote learning.³ Our findings suggest that not nearly enough of these families received the additional digital resources their children needed.

Now is the time for policymakers to redouble their efforts to ensure broadband and device access for lower-income students and families, by building on the considerable gains that the pandemic necessitated in many school districts and communities. The advent of the Emergency Broadband Benefit program, signed into law in April 2021, and the expansion of E-Rate, a program that provides schools and libraries with deep discounts on their purchase of internet access, are important early steps toward this goal.

But we cannot lose focus on digital equity concerns as the urgency of the pandemic subsides. The Emergency Broadband Benefit, for example, will need to be extended after this year and will not resolve under-connectedness on its own. We need to strengthen local capacity in other ways. When a lower-income family has a computer but cannot afford repairs when it malfunctions, or its internet connection is disrupted by having to prioritize other bills, the family enters a cycle of “dependable instability”⁴ that our survey reveals to be an enduring form of digital inequality. Resolving these challenges will require partnering with and expanding the capacities of trusted, local organizations and institutions to ensure that families know exactly where to go when they need something fixed or require other forms of digital assistance.

Furthermore, we urgently need more data on who is under-connected, and ongoing efforts that track the progress being made to reduce the number of families who are under-connected. The under-connected measures we use in our survey (located in the appendix of this report) can easily be deployed by other organizations to begin compiling this crucial knowledge base.

#2: Educators and parents partnered to keep children learning during the pandemic. Those gains should not be squandered in the “return to normal.”
The abrupt, national pivot to remote learning in the spring of 2020 required a major shift in who was responsible for ensuring that children could remain engaged in their schoolwork. Traditionally, this role has primarily been assumed by teachers. When school buildings shut, teachers had to coordinate those responsibilities with parents and other caregivers. The struggles of refining these interdependent roles were enormous for parents and teachers alike. But the shift also meant that new forms of partnership became essential to success, and we believe those hard-won gains are worth building on.

A majority of surveyed parents feel that they know their child’s learning strengths and weaknesses better than they did before the pandemic, in addition to being more familiar with the academic content their children are covering. Educators and school leaders can nurture these gains in the months ahead, when primary responsibility for guiding formal learning returns once more to teachers.

We also found that almost half of parents felt more comfortable communicating with teachers and guiding their children’s homework than they did prior to the pandemic. While this is great news, these finding suggest there is still room for educators to shore up the strong home-school bonds that serve children so well.

Educators will have an immediate opportunity to treat parents like partners: by showing that they share parents’ priorities for their children at the start of the coming school year.

Surveyed parents are most concerned about their children’s social and emotional well-being in the anticipated full return to in-person school nationwide in fall of 2021. Parents want educators to make sure their children have plenty of opportunities to build strong bonds with their peers, whether on the playground or by working together on projects, and that they can develop trusting relationships with their teachers.

While making sure their children are on track academically is important to parents as well, if educators focus on high-dose tutoring and other academic acceleration initiatives without clearly communicating that children’s social and emotional learning are also major priorities, they risk alienating parents instead of deepening their connections to them.

#3: The pandemic year blended formal and informal learning in new ways. Further innovation can enhance families’ learning landscapes in the years ahead.
The necessities of social distancing collapsed boundaries between places and activities that family members had previously done separately and brought them all together, at home. Time at school was transformed into remote learning; play dates with friends went virtual; and for many parents, their work came home as well.

Family members rely on each other and learn together, whether during a pandemic or in less extraordinary circumstances. Our findings show that parents and children frequently helped each other learn about technology in 2015, and that such help is even more prevalent today. Siblings are also helping each other learn with technology more in 2021 than they did in 2015. In Opportunity for All?, which reported our 2015 survey findings, we noted that lower-income families’ digital teamwork was an asset that educators could build on to strengthen learning practices at home. In the wake of the pandemic, we make that same recommendation with renewed vigor.

We also find that educational TV, videos, and games have been important sources of support for parents this year. Parents reported that educational media helped to keep their children learning and growing this year, and the lowest-income families and families of color most of all. Over a third of parents also reported that educational media have been an important resource for explaining the pandemic to their children.

The challenge going forward, as media consumption patterns shift towards pre-pandemic levels, is to ensure that families continue to have access to high-quality offerings that are evidence-based and informed by developmentally appropriate design. Some educational media providers shifted their marketing and fee structures to better reach and serve low- and moderate-income families during the pandemic. They should continue to do so for the foreseeable future to help children and families recover.

Finally, the pandemic affected reading practices in many families by, for example, increasing reliance on e-books, especially for older children. This provides an opportunity for schools and community-based organizations to support literacy efforts in new ways—by distributing books not only through lending and donations, but also via their websites and partnerships with public libraries that provide e-book lending programs. The result would be multiple pathways for children and parents to gain access to reading materials, in print and digital formats.

The pandemic required fast, and sometimes temporary, fixes to adjust to the realities of remote learning. Now we must build on the gains that were borne of necessity. Policymakers, educators, tech providers, libraries, media companies, and parents will all be crucial to how we reimagine digital access and educational opportunity for children as the nation moves beyond the acute stage of the pandemic. We hope these survey findings will help inform and guide such efforts over this crucial transitional summer and for years to come.