Wishful Thinking for Poorer, Less Populated Districts- A Response to "The Digital Divide in Education"

I hope that rapidly increasing technological improvements prove me wrong. I just don't see digital equality ever being achieved. I have been that kid who doesn't have internet at home. It wasn't until the summer going into college when I had unlimited data. Fortunately, I had the benefit of my parents who are both teachers at my high school. Ninth through tenth, all of my papers had to be done at school, since we had no computer at home. But the kids who didn't have computers at home had serious issues getting work done. Unlike Terence Lee's suggestion that kids have to go to the libraries, we only had one with computers that were compatible. And the hours were extremely limited. These kids have jobs. They have family. But instead kids would sit in school in academic recovery until 5:30, some kids, because of the bus, not getting home until 7:30. The stress wasn't coming from the amount of homework, but that students had to worry about whether they could rush and do all of their homework done on the computer in 2 or 3 hours. In eleventh grade we got Chromebooks, making things easier, but without wifi there wasn't much to do. And with suggestion Lee makes that students can go to a restaurant with wifi to work on laptops. The nearest McDonalds is 15 minutes from the school. We still don't have wifi at our house because it isn't available, even though we were promised it would be back in 2016. I hope that one day wifi will be available to all, but our country is large, and, like many high schools, has other problems it needs to fix first before fixing the digital divide.