Inequalities in the Early Years

Bonnie Johnson, Yvonne Pratt-Johnson, Bonnie Johnson, Yvonne Pratt-Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138086036
• eBook ISBN: 9781351618199
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Inequalities in the Early Years examines poverty's effects on children and provides workable solutions for decreasing childhood inequalities through the formal education process. This powerful edited collection explores early childhood inequalities across ten disciplines: earth sciences and geography, life sciences, physical sciences, technology, mathematics, history, society and social institutions, business and economy, the arts, and sports and recreation, following Kipfer's delineation of broad subject areas of knowledge. The volume reaches beyond the domain of education to include multiple perspectives from scholars in the aforementioned disciplines.

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1 Technology

Factors Behind the Digital Divide

Bonnie Johnson and Yvonne Pratt-Johnson

Introduction

Rancid butter, hermetically sealed, torrential downpour, and green grass are collocations, words that are often seen or heard together. Digital divide is moving toward the linguistic category of collocation. In 1994, LASIK, spoiler alert, and supersize entered English; so did digital divide. Its definition: “the economic, educational, and social inequalities between those who have computers and online access and those who do not” (Merriam-Webster, 2017). Words and word pairs come and go; the obsolete gandygut was a person who ate in a gluttonous way; swarf penny was money paid to castle guards (Sperling, 1977). Some words change meanings; lunch, as defined in Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary, meant the amount of food a person could hold in one hand (Johnson & Johnson, 2011). Metcalf (2002) stated that it takes about two generations to know if a word has taken a permanent place in our vocabulary. We sadly predict that if economic circumstances do not change for many young children, digital divide will still be in use 40 years hence.

Mouse Problem

We have seen the digital divide in our underfunded classrooms: computers old and clumsy enough to be in a museum of history, and money spent on software only if higher test scores were promised by sales personnel. A “mouse problem,” as described by a harried district educational technologist, was not a malfunctioning computer device; it was a problem caused by unchecked school rodents chewing through our computer cables. Even when schools have up-to-date devices and software, an Education Week Research Center study showed that, “Teachers in high-poverty schools are consistently less likely than their counterparts to say they’ve received technology-integration training” (Herold, 2017, p. 3). There are only so many dollars to go around.

Lessons from First-Grade Social Studies

Most six- and seven-year-olds learn that food, clothing, and shelter comprise the basic needs of families. These social studies topics are discussed in the contexts of home, school, and neighborhood. This approach to teaching social studies is referred to as the expanding environments pattern where units of study begin with concepts familiar to children and, throughout the years, widen to include ever-more distant environments, concluding with world regions by Grade 8 (Welton, 2005). Those who have spent any time with young children know that they have difficulties with time and distance. The mention of 1861 or 565 miles would draw looks of confusion from young children or would be ignored by them. Discussions of places and conditions close to home are developmentally appropriate for young children because they have concrete examples of these places and conditions—they live in them. This chapter will follow the food, clothing, and shelter framework to examine the daily living experiences of young children that contribute to the digital divide. To eliminate wordiness and clumsiness, the pronoun we will be used to describe personal experiences; one or both of us taught in the conditions discussed below.

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Food: Data Plan or Dinner?

Happy Birthday

Other than an initial introduction, we met bussing trays. St. John’s University in New York City sponsors shuttles to a soup kitchen where University administrators, faculty, staff, and students volunteer to help with lunchtime duties. Our task was to gather plastic trays after the “guests” were finished eating and then take the trays to the man who washed them. We also handed out “extras” to the guests; donated hummus packets (“use by” dates expired) were the extras that day. Amid the crowded, large, unadorned room was a child—around the age of two—in a stroller. As the line formed and meals were dished up, colleagues were told not to give out generous portions because the supply was limited. During the meal, some harsh words were exchanged among a few guests. The woman-in-charge squelched the exchanges. It was a guest’s birthday, so the woman-in-charge played “Happy Birthday” on a cassette recorder. One elderly man danced alone. As the two-year-old’s table mates returned from the line with their trays, the eating began. There were no interactions with the child; people were hungry and were there to eat. When everyone had been served, guests could line up for their hummus extras, and after that could line up against a wall for seconds if there was any food left over.

Eitzen, Zinn, and Smith (2009) wrote, “The school is analogous to a conveyor belt, with people of all social classes getting on at the same time but leaving the belt in accordance with social class—the lower the class, the shorter the ride” (p. 489). We do not see all children toddle onto the belt at the same time. As the child in the stroller, who ate nothing while we were there, quietly took in her surroundings, other children her age were spending their morning in a starkly different environment.

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On our commute from Manhattan to St. John’s University’s Queens campus, we pass a school that epitomizes Fröbel’s Kindergarten. The school, located in an affluent section of Manhattan, truly is a children’s garden. The spacious, bright rooms are filled with enticing materials: expensive blocks sets, art materials of all kinds, carts of children’s picture books, puppets, and so much more. Children’s plants, with pupil-decorated pots, grow in the windows. The children have music, movement, “cooking,” and Spanish lessons. Although no media are visible from the outside windows, we suspect that parents who pay the $26,600 per year (mornings only) tuition for their two-year-olds expect at least introductory, developmentally appropriate lessons on technology. By first grade, all pupils in the school receive their own electronic devices for classroom use. Nutritious snacks are provided by the school.

Weathering is usually applied to rocks and old structures that have endured outdoor exposure. For do-it-yourselfers, paint can be purchased to add a weathered look to newish wood. The paint, report some websites, adds charm—character. Geronimus (1992; Geronimus, Hicken, Keene, & Bound, 2006) used the word weathering, however, to describe what happens to poor adults—especially along racial/ethnic differences—as they live lives of poverty. There is nothing charming about human weathering caused by poverty, and the effects caused by weathering can persist even when children’s environments change as they grow older. Lewin (2005) described how the effects of poverty linger. Della Mae Justice, the subject of Lewin’s writing, moved from a poor household when young to one with more funds. Justice said:

I didn’t know much about the world, and I was always afraid of making a wrong move. When we had a school trip for chorus, we went to a restaurant. I ordered a club sandwich, but when it came with those toothpicks on either end, I didn’t know how to eat it, so I just sat there, staring at it and starving, and said I didn’t feel well.

(p. 66)

Educators see the beginning of the weathering process in the early years, and it begins with working among hungry children. It is no revelation that there are hungry children in America. We have taught them. Some of our pupils were so hungry that they licked their free breakfast and free lunch trays; there are no finicky eaters in a low-income school. We have taught pupils who did not want to go home on Friday afternoons because they knew that there would be no food again until Monday morning’s free school breakfast.

Teachers and administrators in underfunded schools routinely pull out their wallets to buy food for pupils. One of those teachers said, “I can assure you that I had students who came into my classroom without having eaten anything since lunch the previous day” (Walker, 2013, pp. 1–2). A Colorado teacher spoke about a student in her class:

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He wears size XXL shirts to hide what we all know is an emaciated frame. A couple of weeks ago, he used a plastic bag—stretched out to its full length—as a belt. He says he doesn’t get to choose the size of clothes he gets so he makes do with what he has. He tells me I don’t have to buy him food, but I do anyway, because he needs it. He always takes it.

(Strauss, 2015, p. 3)

Statistics on child hunger are not difficult to find. The United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service (USDA ERS) (2017) reported that in 2016, there were 6.5 million children who lived in “food-insecure households” (p. 4). “Food-insecure” is a euphemism for hunger and is defined by the USDA as “insufficient money or other resources for food” (p. 2). There are two categories of food insecurity: low food security and very low food security. These categories, with their descriptions, mean one thing to us: children go hungry. Not all of the millions of children counted by the USDA ERC live in urban communities; even a relatively small community such as Green Bay, Wisconsin (population 105,139; 2016 estimate, U.S. Census Bureau) has four food pantries. Green Bay’s neighboring town, De Pere, has its own food pantry for a population of 24,893 (FoodPantries.org, 2017). Each numeral represents a human being. The adage, “Statistics represent faces with the tears wiped off” (Rank, 2004, p. 37) comes to mind.

Child hunger becomes an even more serious situation as summer begins. Some schools, for the past several years, have been serving free breakfast and free lunch during summer months; a “slice of meat, a biscuit, orange juice and milk” were served at one Louisiana school where a coordinator noted, “Some of the children may not have breakfast or lunch if we didn’t provide it for them” (Wilson, 2004). In Tennessee, a school bus travels with summer lunches for hungry children. On one particular day each sack lunch contained celery sticks (two ounces), canned oranges (four ounces), a bologna sandwich, and chocolate milk. The food costs were supported by the USDA, but as with most freebies, there are rules attached: no seconds, no taking the food home, and the especially stingy “no extra milks” (Saslow, 2013, p. 3).

The USDA uses the term food deserts for areas of the country that do not have enough grocery stores or farmers’ markets to sell healthy foods to residents (American Nutrition Association, 2015). Some years ago, Cassese (2006) wrote about the lack of supermarket chains and sometimes higher prices in low-income areas. Professor of Marketing, Richard Rauch, explained:

There’s a perception [among chains] that low-income areas are difficult . . . They believe you can’t make a large amount of money because people mainly buy basic items and they don’t buy the higher-margin items . . . If you had more competition there, it would change things.

(Cassese, 2006, p. A28)

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When stores are scarce, merchants can charge higher prices. One day on our way home from St. John’s University, we noticed the price of avocados in a low-income area—a food desert—in Queens. Each avocado, non-organic, somewhat shriveled, and not much bigger than a chicken egg, was priced at $2.50. On that same day, we saw non-organic, not-on-sale, larger and plumper avocados for sale in an affluent neighborhood in Manhattan; the price was $1.49 each. The Other America: Poverty in the United States was written in 1962 and was thought to be an impetus for President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, a War that was not “fought to victory” (Shipler, 2004, 2005, p. 6). In The Other America, Michael Harrington refers to economically poor people as being “fat with hunger, for that is what cheap foods do” (p. 2). For $2.50, the price of a puny food-desert avocado, a family can buy two boxes of filling, generic macaroni and cheese dinners and still have money left over.

When families grapple with not having enough to eat, there is less money—or no money—for data plans. Some children stand outside schools in the evenings so that they can use the schools’ “wireless hot spots” to complete their homework; the children have no home Internet services (Kang, 2016, pp. 1–5). Other children rely on Wi-Fi in school buses or access the Internet in fast-food restaurants so that they can do...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Inequalities in the Early Years
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface by Autumn Tooms Cyprès
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• 1 Technology: Factors Behind the Digital Divide
• 2 Mathematics and Measurements: Young Children Count—Undoing Reverse Constructivism During Early Childhood Mathematical Experiences
• 3 Literacy: Poverty, Literacy, and the American Dream—Do Children Fail in Schools, or Do Society and Schools Fail Children?
• 4 Physical Sciences: Pediatric Medical Conditions Associated with Poverty
• 5 Business and Economics: The Transformative Potential of Marketing to Fight Child Poverty
• 6 Society and Social Institutions: The Racial, Spatial, and Intergenerational Contours of Food Inequality in America—Origins, Implications, and Conditions of Possibility
• 7 History: The Evolution of Juvenile Justice
• 8 The Arts: Arts Education and Makerspaces—Opportunities for Democratizing Practices and Supporting Socially Responsible Learning
• 9 Sports and Recreation: Inequalities for Young Children with Regards to Sports and Physical Activity
• 10  Life Sciences: Reaching for the Stars from the Start—Early Learning Experiences in the Sciences
• 11  Earth Sciences and Geography: How Geographic Settings Contribute to Child Poverty with Implications for Child Citizenship Development
• Index