Research Report

Major Project Looks at Digital Access among Low-income Kids

Some 32 million kids aged 0-18 are considered low income in this country.

Some 32 million kids aged 0-18 are considered low income in this country.

We are beginning a week of special reports on the opportunities and challenges game developers face when they help those kids in poor or traditionally underserved communities.

A major research project funded by the Susan Crown Exchange, headed by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and done in coordination with First Book, a nonprofit organization that connects publishers and community organizations, will offer one of the first major assessments of the technology infrastructure and content needs of those groups looking to help low income and socio-economically disadvantaged kids. The survey of over 1,400 teachers and school administrators as well as out-of-school program directors and instructors highlights some of the needs and opportunities for those wanting to use games to engage and educate.

We will be diving into the numbers over the coming week, but wanted to step back and put the issue of low-income in context and offer some insights from some of those groups looking to build digital tools for lower-income communities and those running the out-of-school programs that serve many of those children.

Defining Low-income

Although the descriptions low-income and Title I get thrown around a lot, there is still some confusion about what the terms actually mean and how many students and young people are covered by this description. The low-income standard is set by the government each year and the National Center for Children in Poverty reported that a family of four, including two kids, with income of $47,248 is considered low income. This income is approximately two times the federal poverty level.

BF01811-fig3That means of the nearly 72 million children in the United States, some 44 percent, or 31.8 million, are considered low income. That number has grown slightly in the last 10 years. In 2006 some 40 percent of children lived at the low-income level.

Children of diverse backgrounds and in a broad range of living conditions fall into the low-income category, although statistics from the U.S. Census indicate there are factors that these income challenges do not fall equally across all groups. For example, African American, Latino and Native American children are all more likely to live in low-income households than White or Asian American kids.

Similarly, the educational achievements of the parents seem to play some role in the economic state of the family. Some 86 percent of children whose parents do not have a high school degree live in low-income families. That number drops to 67 percent for high school graduate parents and all the way to 31 percent for parents who have some college or more, regardless of racial background. Also, kids living with a single parent are much more likely to be living in low-income households with 52 percent of kids living with a single parent at low-income levels compared to only 18 percent of children in above low-income families live with a single parent.

Low-income Schools

Many of these lower-income students attend Title I schools. Title I is a provision of the federal Elementary and Secondary School Act that is aimed at helping schools in lower income areas. These schools often have less local tax revenue to run the public school programs and so Title I steps in with grants and programs that aim to help ensure students have access to as good a public school as students in wealthier areas, although inequalities have remained and, according to some experts only worsened as the digital divide grew on top of the traditional one.

“The twenty first-century situation for this huge population is terrible,” said Jane Robinson, chief financial officer at First Book. “As much as the educators are behind the eight ball in terms of print resources, they’re in even worse shape with digital media and the whole broad array of e-learning tools and this is creating a terrible, terrible gap between children in need and children of means.”

At last count some 56,000 schools used Title I funds to provide additional academic support and learning opportunities. These programs can include special preschool, after-school, and summer programs to extend and reinforce the regular school curriculum. Those programs served more than 21 million kids. Of these students, approximately 59 percent were in kindergarten through fifth grade, 21 percent in grades 6-8, 17 percent in grades 9-12, 3 percent in preschool, and less than one percent ungraded.

Despite these programs, questions remain as to how much students who come from poorer areas or face economic and social disadvantages have access to the technologies that could open up their education to personalized and game-based learning in and out of school.

Even as questions remain, some developers have seen this segment of the school population as a market where they can help the most children and perhaps do something most developers only dream of: build a product that works in both the school and consumer market.

We are really, really committed to serving this audience selflessly.  Selfishly, we know that if we want to build this eponymous brand between school and home, educators have to become a centerpiece of our brand. It is really worth the investment for us to work with educators to proliferate this among the schools. But if we do that, parents will follow. It’s hard for it us.  It’s going to take a lot of investment – and in our heart of hearts we really believe that – but there is a massive commercial opportunity around that, that we need to unlock.

— Neal Shenoy, CEO and Co-Founder of Speakaboos.

This group of 32 million children and the 1.2 million teachers who serve them and the thousands of after-school programs that help them make up a unique market, though, says one of the largest out-of-school providers of programs to help low-income kids. Leah Gillam, director of the Mozilla Hive NYC Learning Network, stressed that those people who want to build the learning games and other digital assets that may help underserved communities need to be keenly aware of the challenges these communities face.

“I still really see a need for people who are developing tools, who are developing resources to really reach out and see what is happening around them and see how can we widen who’s using this tool, how can we be the kinds of people who we’re anticipating designing the tool for and then can we really diversify that experience,” Gilliam said this week.

To understand more about that community First Book and the Cooney Center commissioned a major survey of over 1,400 teachers, administrators and program directors around the country to see what their use of technology looks like and what kind of tools they are looking for. On Monday we will report on the state of technology access for these schools and afterschool programs. Next Thursday we will take a closer look at the barriers these programs and classrooms face and what a developer can do to best respond.

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Lee Banville Lee Banville is editor of Gamesandlearning.org. He is also an Professor of Journalism at The University of Montana. For 13 years he ran the online and digital operations of the PBS NewsHour, overseeing coverage of domestic and international stories.