Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era

• In Event: Political Economy of EdTech: Analyses of the Racialized, Gendered, and Classed Dimensions of EdTech in the Global Economy

Abstract

Education researchers struggle with the fact that students arrive at school already shaped by their unequal childhoods (Lareau 2003). Would we see greater gains among less privileged students if they had a more level playing field? Today, kids’ digital skills appear in the form of their digital play with peers. Drawing on 600 hours of observation and over 100 interviews with teachers, administrators, and students, I argue that teachers treat these very similar digital skills from play differently by school demographic. While teachers praise affluent White students for being “innovative” when they bring preexisting tech skills into their classrooms, less affluent students of color do not receive such recognition for the same behavior. Irrespective of what children bring to school, teachers discipline kids’ digital play differently by the race and class of their student body. Prior theorizing on social reproduction in schools suggests that parents transmit to children different and unequal cultural resources across class and race that lead to inequalities in achievement (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990). This study builds on this literature by illustrating that schools unevenly legitimate kids’ similar cultural displays in ways that matter for achievement (Bowles and Gintis 1976).

Author

• Matthew Rafalow, Google Inc