Digital Divisions

How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era

Matthew H. Rafalow

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780226726724
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

In the digital age, schools are a central part of a nationwide effort to make access to technology more equitable, so that all young people, regardless of identity or background, have the opportunity to engage with the technologies that are essential to modern life. Most students, however, come to school with digital knowledge they've already acquired from the range of activities they participate in with peers online. Yet, teachers, as Matthew H. Rafalow reveals in Digital Divisions, interpret these technological skills very differently based on the race and class of their student body.While teachers praise affluent White students for being "innovative" when they bring preexisting and sometimes disruptive tech skills into their classrooms, less affluent students of color do not receive such recognition for the same behavior. Digital skills exhibited by middle class, Asian American students render them "hackers, " while the creative digital skills of working-class, Latinx students are either ignored or earn them labels troublemakers. Rafalow finds in his study of three California middle schools that students of all backgrounds use digital technology with sophistication and creativity, but only the teachers in the school serving predominantly White, affluent students help translate the digital skills students develop through their digital play into educational capital. Digital Divisions provides an in-depth look at how teachers operate as gatekeepers for students' potential, reacting differently according to the race and class of their student body. As a result, Rafalow shows us that the digital divide is much more than a matter of access: it's about how schools perceive the value of digital technology and then use them day-to-day.

1

Similar Technologies, Different Schools

School ethnographers often have vivid memories of their first few field visits. Although scholarship on education technology is a relatively new literature, I was armed for my first visits with a set of rough hypotheses from a century of work on the sociology of education. Scholars have long argued that race and class are strong predictors of academic success. The proposed causes vary but include differences in neighborhoods, school resources, and pedagogical approaches. Although the schools in this study all had access to high-quality education technologies and a stated mission to integrate them into teaching, sociological priming led me to expect that I would see digital technologies used largely as paperweights in schools serving less-affluent students of color.

I was wrong. As I toured the halls of César Chávez Middle School, a school serving predominantly working-class Latinx youth, I saw digital technologies literally everywhere. They were actively being used by students and teachers alike. Nearly every room was equipped with an interactive whiteboard. iPad carts were often out and being used by students at their desks. Teachers showed me an online system they used between classes and after school to regularly communicate with students about assignments and help answer questions that came up. “A lot of schools like this don’t have the resources we have,” explained Ms. Bryant, the school technology manager. “We consider ourselves very fortunate and really believe that technology can help these kids prepare for the future.”

What was particularly stunning was that Heathcliff Academy, a private school primarily serving White wealthy youth just about thirty miles away, was similar in both technology saturation and digital outlook. “I mean, it’s the way of the future,” explained Mr. Crouse, the school technology manager. “To not integrate technology at school is to not teach them in the twenty-first century. It’s how we ensure their later success.” Like Chávez, Heathcliff had iPads widely available for its students. Both schools also shared pedagogical commitments to teaching digital skills like information searching, website creation, and programming, and both purchased the latest in educational software for classroom management and teaching. If a learning scientist were to survey teachers and students at both schools, they would be delighted to find that despite student racial-ethnic and socioeconomic differences, school-level gaps in technology availability and digitally minded instruction were seemingly closed.

But surveys are blunt measures of shared phenomena. While they are great for scaled analysis, they cannot provide a systematic account of day-to-day life on the ground. As I observed classroom life over the course of an academic year at each of the schools in the study, I became acutely aware of differences in how school members talked about the promises of digital technology and the divergent ways they enacted the use of digital tools practice.

For example, iPads at Heathcliff were used for online communication and collaboration, integrating photos and videos taken of friends and family into projects, and sometimes even for adapting the assignment to the students’ own interests. At Chávez, however, such activities were seen as valueless when compared with what were called “basic skills,” or routinized, creativity-free demonstrations of digital labor: using correct grammar online, finding online media but not creating it, completing prescribed digital assignments but not adapting assignments based on students’ ideas from their digital experiences.

These differences were also evident in the use of common tools. Although students at each school enjoyed playing Minecraft, a creativity-centered video game, only Heathcliff students were allowed to periodically swap out a writing assignment with a video game creation. It appeared that kids’ digital play reaped different rewards depending on the school. Young people’s digital creativity—the innovative potential so celebrated by contemporary stories of twenty-first-century success—was required by teachers at Heathcliff and dismissed at Chávez.

What gives? Digital technologies were certainly woven into the fabric of each of the middle schools in this study, but scholars caution us against assuming that iPads, laptops, and other devices have power in and of themselves over the particulars of day-to-day life. In fact, although each school had many similar technologies at their disposal and depended on them for instruction, they perceived their uses in very different ways. This stands in contrast to what some call “technological determinism,” or the idea that the very existence of technologies exerts a structuring influence.1 This line of thinking paints technology as uniformly either the solution or the barrier to achievement gaps in schools, rather than considering how technologies are adopted in different ways and why.

In the 1980s and 1990s, schools rolled out early computers for teaching.2 Education researchers and popular media reported that the presence of these devices had an inherent impact on the classroom, without respect to human factors that shaped how they were adopted. The teachers and administrators at the schools in this study exhibited a similar, shared rhetoric around digital technology use at school: digital technologies must be integrated in the classroom no matter what; students need digital skills to succeed in school; and digital know-how will surely help students succeed in the twenty-first-century economy.

Here, sociologists may have the explanatory upper hand in understanding why technologies may be used differently in different schools. There may be institutional factors at play that structure differentiated instructional approaches. One common argument is that children arrive at school with unequal sets of advantages, like a leg up on certain skills, given to them by their families of origin. I explore this in depth in the next chapter, countering that nearly all youth in the study shared baseline sets of digital skills (a fascinating artifact of youth-led digital adoption nationwide) and that these similar skills were still treated differently by schools. Another sociological body of work that I explore here focuses on the powerful role that institutions play in constructing social reality for their inhabitants.3 Social reproduction theorists argue that schools differently impose informal sets of expectations on students in ways that reproduce class-based inequality. They argue that teachers collectively share beliefs about the labor market prospects of their student population and then enact these beliefs during instruction through “discipline.” The term applies not simply to correcting students’ bad behavior, but to an institutional process of socialization that determines appropriate behavior and internalizes norms in students.4

Social reproduction theory takes a Marxist stand on how children’s creativity is controlled and cultivated in ways that lead to divergent labor market outcomes. Discipline, in this sense, is the means by which the “threatening” potential of kids’ creativity—the extent to which they are allowed to have new ideas that could meaningfully change classroom life—is controlled. Research shows that teachers systematically limit the potential of youth of color by devaluing the cultural forms they bring to school because they are not well aligned with normative expectations. In one study, Angela Valenzuela finds that signs of students’ Mexican-influenced culture, including Spanish language, Spanish-sounding names, and approaches to learning favored by Mexican schools, are deemed useless for achievement at schools in the United States.5 In another study, Prudence Carter similarly finds that the cultural styles and interests of working-class Black and Latinx students are devalued by teachers at their schools.6 As a result, these children take on the burden of adapting, with mixed success, to White middle-class institutional expectations that have little to do with their potential as learners. And in yet another example, a study by Patricia M. McDonough finds that guidance counselors advise working-class high schoolers to apply for working-class jobs, whereas they coach middle- and upper-class high schoolers to apply to colleges.7 Teachers’ instructional practices are thus shaped by a collective “common sense” about their students and their potential. This logic may shape the perceived value and uses of similar technologies depending on the school’s student population.

It thus becomes the ethnographic task to document this “common sense” at each middle school and connect these varied logics with instructional practice. How do teachers construct the value of digital technologies? How, if at all, are digital technologies used in patterned ways by schools?

Three Middle Schools

Social reproduction theorists have fielded a series of critiques over the years, many of them well warranted. As a direct extension of Marxist thinking, much related work for many years focused almost exclusively on social class and the unequal distribution of wealth. Contemporary work is more illustrative of the ways in which schools inadvertently assemble a matrix of domination, in which statuses such as race-ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, etc., are profoundly linked to the school processes that set children up for unequal labor market outcomes. In this book, I largely focus on the intersection of race-ethnicity and social class in an effort to do some justice to these literatures. I periodically allude to, but do not well develop, how gender is inflected in the cases I study. Gender, sexuality, and other intersections are critical factors in need of unpacking to fully explore digital education and inequality. I humbly turn to my colleagues to help address these gaps.

One of the central benefits of comparative ethnographic research is that I am able to chart the challenges and opportunities of using digital technology in schools where I could account for many of the factors that are said to shape technology use. I specifically selected schools where education technologies were widely available and where administrators were committed to financially and programmatically supporting technology use in the classroom. Teachers also exhibited a comparable spectrum of training and stated technology skill at each school (see the appendix for more detail on teacher characteristics). I was also fortunate that at the time of my study, teachers even reported that standardized testing was not a constraining factor. California was undergoing a rollout of new digitized testing, and teachers said that this rollout was a calibration period and they could not be expected to prepare their students for an exam nobody had seen before.

Another methodological contribution I add here to studies of education and technology is that although each school in this study shares similar commitments to technology in the classroom, the student populations vary by student race-ethnicity and social class (see table 2.1). Heathcliff Academy is a private middle school with a predominant population of wealthy, White youth. Sheldon Junior High is a public middle school whose student body is composed largely of middle-class Asian American youth. And César Chávez Middle School is a public middle school serving primarily working-class Latinx youth. These differences allow me to unearth when and why student race-ethnicity and class matter in shaping different constructions and uses of digital technology at school.

Despite similarities in school digital access and training, and despite the general lack of state test pressure, digital tools were used in different ways to different ends. As I discuss in this chapter and throughout the book, social forces undergird the patterned yet disparate uses of similar technologies available at school. At schools with similar technology availability, similar institutional commitment to technology integration, and similar teacher training, the norms and habits ingrained in each school differently establish webs of meaning associated with the value of digital technology. The different student racial-ethnic and class populations in this study thus experience quite different educational experiences with very similar digital tools.

Technology Talk: Digital Technology and Educational Promise

During my first interviews with teachers, I asked what they thought about the role of technology in schooling. “Just look at Salman Khan—ugh, I’m obsessed!” said Ms. Fillion, a sixth-grade math teacher at Chávez. “He’s revolutionized learning. Technology is the key to getting these kids into good schools and jobs someday.”

Khan Academy was all the rage among the teachers in my study at the time that I began fieldwork. Salman Khan founded the nonprofit organization in 2006 to develop tutorial videos aimed at helping primary school students get “unstuck” during common school assignments in subjects like math or science. His name frequently came up when I asked teachers about the value of technology with respect to schooling. “I mean, it goes without saying that we use Khan Academy whenever we can,” explained Ms. Leary, a sixth-grade language arts teacher at Sheldon Junior High. “Teachers only know so much, and it’s a good way for kids to learn on their own and take it to the next level. That’s what prepares them for the future.”

Teachers at each school cited Khan and his work as an example of the promise of technology for improving education. “We actually had Salman come speak here, you know,” said Ms. Kramer, an eighth-grade science teacher at Heathcliff. I learned that the school recently got the CEO of Khan Academy to speak to teachers and students about the power of technology for learning. “He was so amazing. These things available online help us and these kids move in the right direction.”

The promise of digital tools for learning carried considerable weight not only among teachers but also in both education reforms and research on digital literacies. As schools increasingly get access to digital technologies for learning, researchers have focused on the importance of teaching students digital skills to find information online so that they can learn at their own, individualized pace. Teachers across all three schools drew upon a triple mythos of the importance of digital technologies for learning: that integrating technologies into regular classroom practice was good no matter what; that digital tools were essential to a pedagogy that leads to positive academic outcomes; and that digital tools were essential to improving students’ odds of getting a job in the twenty-first century. Khan Academy was seen by teachers as one digital means by which to help kids achieve some of these educational goals, and Salman himself was regarded as an inspiration to teachers and their students.

When reflecting on the role of technology in the classroom, teachers at each school shared that they believed that it was necessary for digital technologies to be integrated to give students a proper education. “I’ve worked in schools where there’s one computer from the nineties in each classroom and it sits in the corner and never gets used,” said Ms. McDonough, a seventh-grade language arts teacher at Sheldon. “I mean, how embarrassing! Technology must be integrated to be effective; it should be a part of how you teach each lesson.” Faculty emphasized that technology should be integrated with learning, meaning that technologies should be woven into their everyday practices. “Every subject, every day,” Mr. Filippo, a seventh-grade social studies teacher at Heathcliff, put it bluntly. “For teaching to be effective, and for technology to be effective, it has to be built into our lessons. That’s how technology can do what it’s supposed to, to help these kids.” By including it somehow in their lessons, and doing it regularly, teachers could ensure that technology would achieve its full effect in helping students learn. “I mean, think about all the ways we use technology in our daily lives. Why should school be excluded from that?” asked Ms. Underwood, an eighth-grade math teacher at Chávez. “In today’s age, for school to be good for kids, you need to include technology just like we do everywhere else.” Faculty at each school constructed the value of technology as essential for schooling.

One reason why teachers saw digital technology integration as essential was that it helped from a pedagogical point of view. Faculty argued that digital technologies were necessary to good teaching practice for nearly every academic subject. “Oh my gosh, don’t even get me started,” said Ms. Ullman, a seventh-grade history teacher at Sheldon. “There are tons of ways digital skills help with learning history. I mean, these days you have to know how to Google to look up and learning about anything—like the Persian War.” Ms. Ullman, and other teachers across a variety of subjects, described the power of using the internet to supplement their instruction. “Personalized learning is also really important, and technology has really helped with that,” explained Mr. Hagan, a sixth-grade science teacher at Chávez. “We have software or websites that let us give assignments that are at the level that the student is at. We can know right away how they’re doing and make sure they’re challenged.” When asked about the value of digital technology for schooling, many teachers at each school talked about personalized learning, or the notion that students have individual learning needs that should be attended to in order to help them achieve. “I mean, personalized learning has always been a thing,” explained Mr. Crump, an eighth-grade language arts teacher at Sheldon. “But just think. Never before have we had the tools to not only know our students’ performance at any time, but also then provide them with new challenges tailored to their level. Technology lets us do that.”

Teachers also shared a vision that digital technology was essential for helping their students eventually succeed in the labor market. “It’s honestly a sin that there are still schools out there without things like iPads or laptops or SMART boards,” explained Ms. West, a sixth-grade science teacher at Sheldon. “We know that having technology around helps kids learn and helps them in the future. If we know that, why aren’t we making sure it’s our number one priority everywhere?”

Ms. Grey, a sixth-grade language arts teacher at Chávez, expressed a similar complaint. “It honestly breaks my heart that there are kids out there who will go through their entire education never having used a computer,” she lamented. “It’s as if our country has decided to send those kids directly to the streets.” Teachers at each school exhibited a shared philosophy that digital technologies should be included as part of the fabric of classroom life to help students achieve. “Our country should be ashamed of themselves,” scolded Ms. Leary, a sixth-grade language arts teacher at Sheldon. “More schools should have the digital technology that we do. These kids need it if they want a shot at a good future.” When first sharing this belief, teachers typically drew upon a moral obligation to provide and integrate technology at school. In their view, providing educational technologies at school was directly associated with improved academic outcomes and avoiding students’ later failures in the labor market.

Teachers at each school exhibited a shared language around the stated value of technology at school. They believed digital technology was essential to learning, t...