More, Less or Just Different? Ed Tech in High vs. Low Poverty Schools
By Justin Wedell, Cameron White and Tonika Cheek Clayton
Is ed tech closing or expanding gaps in educational opportunity in today’s public school system? While we on the NewSchools Ed Tech team believe ed tech can be a powerful tool for supporting positive student outcomes, we also recognize the benefits of these tools are not always evenly distributed. This reality influences our approach to ed tech investing, which prioritizes tools that support students in underserved communities. In this vein, we pay particular attention to the influence of socioeconomic status on students’ experiences of ed tech. We’re always interested in better understanding whether existing ed tech tools are meeting the needs of students and teachers in high-poverty schools, whether and how ed tech use differs among students and teachers at high- and low-poverty schools, and, if so, what might contribute to these differences.
To that end, we dug into data from our recent partnership with Gallup to explore the use and perception of ed tech among a nationally representative sample of students and educators in U.S. PreK-12 public schools. We wanted to see if there were differences in teacher and student perceptions in low- and high-poverty schools.
Our findings show that depending upon the percentage of low-income students in a school, young people may encounter learning environments that feature different expectations for how ed tech can support teaching and learning.
Even so, the data from the survey defy easy answers and clear explanations on these topics. Rather, they reveal complex needs, motivations, and hurdles that speak to the challenge and the promise of ed tech in supporting greater educational equity.
We invite you to read the following mini-posts that explore our four findings and offer our interpretation of what they might signal. Together they tell at least part of the story by examining differences related to demand, access, usage and perceptions of effectiveness.
What’s Next?
Many factors, large and small, can intervene to boost or stunt the potential of ed tech in a classroom. We chose to focus on differences in perceptions of ed tech between teachers in high- and low-poverty schools because it brings us closest to questions of equitable access and uses of ed tech to support teaching and learning.
This essay highlights four noteworthy differences, but we caution drawing hasty conclusions. They may point to an equity gap that deserves focused attention of education leaders or they may simply reflect teachers and administrators being responsive to their students’ needs.
Clearly, our analysis answered some questions only to leave us with new ones. For instance, how can ed tech developers committed to educational equity account for a variety of device-access scenarios in order to be accessible and impactful within classrooms across the socioeconomic spectrum? How are students and teachers leveraging ed tech to meet their unique needs? And how do educators define “effectiveness” when applied to ed tech?
We plan to continue working to better understand these differences and explore how ed tech can better meet the needs of teachers and students of all backgrounds to support academic and social-emotional growth.
Finally, if you’d like to do your own digging into the research, we invite you to read the survey questions and responses that inspired this post. Or, to request the full dataset from the NewSchools-Gallup report on ed tech usage, please visit the More to Learn page of our companion piece.
