Free computers for everyone! Test scores rocket higher with free take-home laptops!

[jdomaha]

It's money well, spent, schools issuing laptops to students. With all these school districts passing out laptops as if they were condoms, you'd expect all the test scores to rise and all the academic inequality to vanish into thin air. After all, only rich people have the money to buy computers, and that's why their kids do well in school. It has nothing to do with drive and desire to succeed, or with parental determination and oversight, or with the student's willingness to work.

Guess not.

In the United States, Jacob L. Vigdor and Helen F. Ladd, professors of public policy at Duke University, reported similar findings. Their National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, “Scaling the Digital Divide,” published last month, looks at the arrival of broadband service in North Carolina between 2000 and 2005 and its effect on middle school test scores during that period. Students posted significantly lower math test scores after the first broadband service provider showed up in their neighborhood, and significantly lower reading scores as well when the number of broadband providers passed four.

The Duke paper reports that the negative effect on test scores was not universal, but was largely confined to lower-income households, in which, the authors hypothesized, parental supervision might be spottier, giving students greater opportunity to use the computer for entertainment unrelated to homework and reducing the amount of time spent studying.

The North Carolina study suggests the disconcerting possibility that home computers and Internet access have such a negative effect only on some groups and end up widening achievement gaps between socioeconomic groups. The expansion of broadband service was associated with a pronounced drop in test scores for black students in both reading and math, but no effect on the math scores and little on the reading scores of other students. In the report, the authors do not speculate about what caused the disparities. Neither author responded to a request for an interview.

Now, the authors of the study did not speculate, but I'm sure there are one or two readers of WickedFire who might speculate about what causes these disparities.

 

[ly2 from WF]

People will never be equal, I wish the government would stop wasting time and money trying to make it happen.

 

[Andrew Scherer]

Things that make you go hmm: Broadband internet on a free laptop makes you retarded.

 

[vgeek]

They were probably Macbooks.