Introducing Digital Equity
As COVID-19 steered nations toward virtual learning platforms, the unprepared schools and teachers scrambled to adjust their learning platforms and curricula to accommodate the new situations. As a student in Bellevue, Washington, at the time, I, along with all of the students of the Washington School District, were given school computers even before the pandemic due to Bill Gates’ funding. I was unaware that this was not the case for every other school district. Indeed, across the states, there were students with poor internet connectivity and even those without access to laptops or other digital devices to attend school.
This unequal access has been referred to as the “digital divide.” The digital divide encompasses access to computers and internet subscriptions, and quality and source of access are also important. For example, before the pandemic, youth from low-income households were less likely to have internet access beyond their cellular devices, access to good quality internet in their areas, and may have had limited access to devices due to sharing with others in the household. The COVID-19 pandemic shifted online learning from an auxiliary tool to the primary format for schooling, thus exacerbating these disparities (Golden et al. 2023).
After schools returned to an in-person system, test scores for state tests on math and reading revealed that, “In a typical state, students last spring were still about half a year behind where their predecessors were in 2019. In a few states, the gap approaches a full year” (Leonhardt 2025). Lower-income students are even further behind upper-income students than they were five years ago, and Black students and Latino students are even further behind Asian and white students.
I cannot count the number of times during the pandemic when a classmate would sleep through class, use poor internet connectivity to avoid doing groupwork, or cheat on assessments. Meanwhile, students around the nation and the world could only dream of having access to these digital resources.
This invigorated me to ponder the efforts to close such an unfair reality, where those who genuinely want and need resources are those who are denied the opportunity to uncover their full potential. I read Morgan Ames’ The Charisma Machine, which was an effort to close the digital gap by giving $100 laptops to students in the Mercosur region, relying on the students’ innate understanding of computers to unlock an untapped learning medium. However, because of poor teacher instructions and a lack of cultural understanding of the students and families, this project was cut short in 2014.
However, this project does not claim that closing the digital gap is the only solution to solving problems regarding education. Even with access to digital resources during the pandemic, I was severely behind in math afterward, and this showed on all of my assessments and grades in high school, where such scores unfortunately held the most weight. This resulted from poor lesson planning and a lack of proper direction. Ultimately, effective education must have a balance of interpersonal direction and teaching, along with the necessary resources as a channel.
Digital Equity aims to construct a bridge for this balance, and I hope you will support this journey as it evolves.
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Works Cited
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Kwon, Minji, et al. "The Impact of COVID-19 on Learning Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis." Journal of Educational Research, vol. 118, no. 3, 2023, pp. 210–225. PubMed Central, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10259090/. Accessed 10 May 2025.
Smith, Jane. "COVID Learning Losses: A Global Perspective." The New York Times, 11 Feb. 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/briefing/covid-learning-losses.html. Accessed 10 May 2025.
Ames, Morgan G. The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child. MIT Press, 2019.