School closures exposes internet inequality

One Catholic school requires students to have their uniforms on at 8:15 a.m., and log in on the Internet for a live roll call. Another private school does hourly classes live-streamed. Another has a dedicated portal with assignments checked daily.

Yet, countless New Orleans students, many of them from the lowest-performing public schools, have no way to check in with their classes; no stable home life to make sure they are dressed and active before the strike of 9 a.m. Most importantly, the digital divide does not provide them with sufficient Internet or computer resources to “remote school” even if the teachers have set up a stable schedule. These “forgotten children” may prove the greatest victims of the coronavirus.

Critics of the pandemic remote schooling crisis have pondered if the current school year should just be prolonged by a month, with lost time made up in the summer, yet strained budgets and teacher contracts render such options to extend the school year unlikely. Still, very little is known about how previous epidemic-related closures affected students’ longterm school trajectories. Past studies have focused on shorter-term impacts on test scores rather than dropout rates – which may show up months or years later. Nevertheless, significant research finds individual absenteeism increases the likelihood that students will eventually disengage and drop out of school, and school-wide closures for other reasons – such as natural disasters and weather events – have also been found to lower academic progress and graduation rates. Many contend that the spike in crime rates four years after Katrina can be directly traced to displaced students in the aftermath of the hurricane.

Never has the need to put a computer in the hands of every school child been made more clear. With $1.5 trillion dollars already allocated, spending enough to outfit public school students with personal computers should be a logical addition to any federal bailout.

Perhaps even more important, public access to free Wi-Fi has gone from a luxury to a veritable necessity. In New Orleans, at least, use of police towers and communication systems could provide pretty ubiquitous public access to Wi-Fi; however, contracts with cable and cell providers prevent local governments from giving general free access to the Internet on the streets – except in a state of emergency. Fortunately, this pandemic qualifies, yet the crisis should also teach us that access to the internet – and bridging the digital divide – constitutes a human right, which should be available long after the coronavirus passes.

This article originally published in the March 23, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.