I wrote yesterday about a teacher’s blog post framed as being about “Today’s students” and offering advice about technology in schools, based on the experiences of these particular students.

These were some of wealthiest children in the country.

Today, an article came across Twitter about the lengths a district near me is going to provide the most basic access to technology to low-income students.

These are also “today’s students” and they do not have the privilege of being indifferent about technology.

It is not ok to render them invisible when talking about children very very different from them.

I was intrigued at first by the tweets.  MiddleWeb distributes great information about teaching in the middle years:

Why do today’s digital students often prefer low-tech learning? @CherylTeaches wonders if we’re overdoing #edtech. http://t.co/wBcm3AJ8Pa

— MiddleWeb (@middleweb) December 12, 2014

So I clicked through.  @CherylTeaches asks great and important questions about when we do and don’t use tech in schools, but her experiences didn’t resonate with what I hear from many teachers.

She wrote about how, when given choices in schools, her students often choose something other than technology.  She goes on to wonder if “we”, meaning the profession for whom she’s writing, overestimate the extent to which students find technology engaging.

She sounds like a terrific teacher and and I want to be as  clear as I can be that this post is not about her as a teacher or disagreement with anything that she said about tech in schools.

It’s just that I am so troubled by the language that we use to evade talking about social class and education.

The tweet promises news about “today’s digital students’.  The author writes about “today’s students” and then writes sensitively about what she sees in her students.

We don’t learn until the biographical statement at the end that this teacher currently works in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.  Her students live in a community in which the per capita (not household) income is  $104,920 .  Bloomfield Hills ranks within the top five wealthiest communities in America. 

I began my teaching career in in Appalachia, in Jackson County, Kentucky.  When I was teaching there, it was one of the poorest school districts in the country. Today, the per capita income for the county is $10,711. 36.50% of children under 18 live below the poverty level.

I’m trying to imagine any circumstances in which a teacher in Jackson County Kentucky could write a piece for a major, excellent education group like MiddleWeb that was framed as being about the experiences of “Today’s students”.    I’m trying to imagine this teacher then offering advice about how teachers in other places might think about using technology, based on her experiences with some of the poorest children in the country.

It would never happen.

Teachers working with the wealthiest families in the country no doubt bring their full energies to the challenges of working in such communities.  It is great when they listen to their students on reflect on how to best serve those children.

But in these times of growing and serious digital divides in which high and low income children use computers in very different ways,  offering advice to teachers about “today’s students” based on the children of the wealthiest people in the country –who have out-of-school access to any tech device they might wish to have — is troubling at best.

Much of my teaching involves new forms of digital media for communication, connection, and creativity.  This work is grounded solidly in my commitments to ensuring that all children learn the cultural forms that will enable them to fully participate in public life as advocates, learners, and citizens.    As a culture, and as educators, we still have an enormous amount to learn about the rapid changes in digital culture, and at least some of what we have to learn is about how to bridge growing digital divides between low-income children (who, in school, are most likely to be using computers for skill and drill practice or testing) and more privileged peers (who are more likely to use computers for creation and self-directed pursuit of informal learning around personal interests).

A few weeks ago, a social justice organization that I respect greatly posted a link to an awful essay on children and digital media.  I hate to even include the link here because “clicks” count in generating audience for yet more of this sort of nonsense.  Chris Rowan, the author of the essay, misses the very basic lesson of Statistics 101 and continually conflates things happening together as technology *causing* everything from autism (which she labels a mental illness)  to violence to obesity.  The studies she cites (while claiming to be doing a literature review, which would have required that she actually critique, not just list the studies)  are almost laughably flawed.  She claims in comments that children who use technology won’t develop social relationships.  Elsewhere on her website (where she sells $1000s worth books and workshops to cure the problems she claims are created by technology) she laments that teachers no longer teach hours of handwriting a week, as this is the only way that children will become literate.

Yet this social justice organization posted this link on Facebook, noting that the article that “has important implications for teachers and parents”.  And on Facebook, 234 followers of this social justice organization “liked” the post and 135 shared the article with their Facebook friends.  “Great to know”, they wrote.  “Food for Thought” wrote others.

Commenters insisted that instead of using technology, children should be outside playing free, as if one precludes the other.

As if all children live in neighborhoods where it’s safe to run free, or that parents are free to usher their children around to play dates in the wild.

They insist that instead of watching TV or playing with tablets (two very different experiences that they didn’t bother to distinguish), they should be spending time on parents’ laps reading.    As if one precludes the other.

As if all parents have time to snuggle with their children over books for hours each day,  and all children might happily play with retro-wooden toys while their parents cook organic dinners from scratch.

Today, I read a very different report.  The Cooney Center, which does actual  credible research on how children use media, finds that lower income children are significantly more likely to use educational media on digital devices than wealthier peers.   Barbara Ray, the author of this  essay, asks, appropriately I believe,  whether the very broad backlash against “screen time” as evidenced in the Facebook comments around Rowan’s essay is part of elite parents’ snobbish views of television (and now other screens) and their judgments of  low-income parents.

We have an enormous amount to learn about these new shifts in digital technologies.

All of those socially-just readers who “liked” and shared Chris Rowan’s essay seem to simply assume that their ways of parenting are inherently superior, and that poor parents trying to find ways to provide their children with educational opportunities within the geographic and and economic constraints of their lives are misguided.

Even though those socially-just readers missed completely the lack of evidence, the faulty logic, and the self-interest  running through the entire Rowan essay.

Update:   More refuting the “research” in this essay, pointing out what others (but not the social justice organization) saw just by looking at the actual studies.