 It gives me enormous pleasure to introduce our next panel and our next moderator, Dr. Kevin Clark. Everybody knows Dr. Kevin Clark, but I'll give you a short introduction. Kevin is a professor at George Mason University where he is also the founding director of the Center for Digital Media Innovation and Diversity. His research interests include the role of interactive in digital media and education. He's very well known, actually the nation's leading expert on issues of diversity in educational media, and in broadening participation in STEM careers and disciplines. He's been an advisor to every national organization that matters in the public media space, in the national parks space, and in sort of the space of doing better for America in terms of providing opportunities for all. So it gives me great pleasure to introduce Kevin Clark. I need to take Michael with me everywhere and have him introduce me. I know, thank you, thank you. And for those of you who don't know me, after the last presentation, I'm sure that you can Google me and learn everything you want to know about me. That Facebook thing scared me. I'm going to have to start de-friending a whole bunch of people. They're messing up my credit. So these, now what we're going to do, is this? Okay. Now what we're going to do, this session is going to focus on three things. One is going to be parent engagement, collaborative learning, and then lastly we're going to talk about community resources, and looking at the tools that help promote and foster learning through technology. We also want to take a more in-depth look at outreach to immigrant families, and we're also going to use the same basic format as we did last time. Shayna has said that she's not going to take any prisoners, and she said don't make her have to get up. So what we're going to do is start with the first topic, which looks at the reality of parent engagement in lower income communities. We've heard from the data. It talked about interactions and people helping people, so parents helping children, children helping parents, and kids helping each other. And so we're going to start with that theme, and our first speaker is going to be Susan Newman. Dr. Newman is a professor at New York University. She's a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Elementary and Secondary Education, and she is the author of Giving Our Children a Fighting Chance, Poverty, Literacy, and a Development of Information Capital. Please welcome Dr. Susan Newman. The conversation this morning was just wonderful, focusing on the importance of bridging the digital divide, but I wanted to take our conversation a little bit in a different direction. I wanted to talk about some of the ramifications of Vicki's reports and talk about a particular study that we did over a 10-year period. We were looking at two communities in Philadelphia, one of poverty and one of privilege, and it was a 10-year study, which is a little bit difficult to summarize in five minutes, but I wanted to highlight a couple of things that we did because it is a cautionary tale for some of the conversations this morning. So what we did is we were looking at these two very different communities, one that was concentrated poverty, 40% high poverty, 67% child poverty, versus a middle and mainstream perhaps a well-to-do community. And we did our ethnographies over a 10-year period, focusing on the library. The reason we looked at libraries is we wanted to level the playing field and actually watch parent engagement in these two very different communities. We began before technology actually was in those libraries, and so we looked at how parents and children interacted with books. And what we would see in the high poverty libraries, very often the child came by themselves, they were coming in at nine o'clock in the morning, they were leaving at five, they would go to the preschool little area that you see in the library, they would open up a book, they would look for someone to read to them, they would see no one, they would put it down. They would take another book, they'd look for someone to read to them, they could not read, they're only three and four years old, they would put it down. And we became and saw a pattern of what we call flipping of a child wanting to read, desperately wanting to read, not having the resources to read and putting it down. At the other side, what we found in the mainstream or upper income neighborhood was a parent that was very, very different. This parent was in control for the moment she came in, the kid always came, with the parent or a nanny the child was mentored very carefully and how to use books. What we would see is that the parent would say, this book is too hard for you, this book is too easy, this has appropriate pages at Sarah. And so the child over time would know what kind of book to kind of get at because of this heavy duty mentoring. So as I said, it was a ten year study and so we looked at the transition over time when now we have computers and we're very interested in very early behavior because behavior in these very early years is indicative of what we're seeing later on. And what we found with the computer is that for the parent who came from the low income neighborhood that parent positionally would be different. He would stand, the parent would stand in the back of the child not seated next to the child. They were in the back, they would nod. When the child had problems with the computer or didn't know how to use something the parent would find someone for help but never be able to answer any questions. In other words, the parent was very, very passive and so what often happens is the child just sort of on the computer and that was that. In the other neighborhood what we found is that parent was there next to, not behind, next to the child doing the same kinds of behavior and mentoring activities that would occur with the book. We found the app that was used, the appropriate kinds of materials. It was a little prep school in a box. And what we found is that child was learning the letters, learning the sounds, learning vocabulary very, very early on before ever coming to kindergarten. Now the reason I mentioned that is that when we looked at tweens we found the same kinds of behavior. In the poor community we found a lot of fragmented and a little bit of this, a little bit of that, not terribly focused on learning. When we went to the middle, that was a kid who was doing their homework. They were using the computers to maximum capacity. They were their own reference librarian which we did not see in the poor community. So what is the cautionary tale, and I'll stop in a moment, and that is that when you think about the digital divide you've got to think about these early patterns that become instantiated over time that might say you might think you're doing your job and saying everybody now has access but we are not doing our job if we widen the knowledge gap and that is what we're seeing initially in our work. We're seeing that some people are using it well, some people are using it not very well and we're seeing an increase in the knowledge divide. Thank you. Thanks Susan. So as we think about the knowledge divide that Susan has laid before us we should also think about well how do you close it, how do you bridge it, how do you prepare young people to be successful and so the respondent is going to be my own Lisa Guernsey and she's going to talk about the work she's been doing to provide media mentors for young people and let me plug you first. She is a co-author with Michael Levine of Tap, Click, Read Growing Readers in a World of Screens. Lisa Guernsey. I know that many of you have seen a lot of me already so I will be quick but I want to first say that it is always really interesting and helpful to hear Susan Newman talk about that research. It's really informed a lot of what we've been doing in the New America Education Policy Program. So I'm just going to quickly describe what we see as perhaps one solution to this, this idea that yes, the technology is needed but it's not enough and it's not a silver bullet and we need to make sure that there is a person at the side of our children, our students growing up today who's helping them navigate and helping them find and challenge themselves. So over the past several years this has been an issue that's really become a big one in the early education world. Those who are working with children 0 to 8 years of age and are working with their families and they're finding that many of these families really are eager to use new media, want to get online, want to show their children all sorts of cool resources and are having trouble kind of navigating the massive amount of just in that marketplace alone is incredibly confusing as well as understanding how to use media in ways that really promote learning. So the library community and many others have come up with a concept and I've helped to kind of push this as well called media mentorship. And the idea is that we should use it's almost really a new job description for our 21st century learning world where we should use our librarians in our public libraries, our children's librarians, our family care providers and our early educators who have connections to families and who are really those trusted intermediaries and give them the training to become that mentor to families, to parents. I find it really encouraging that this report that the Vickies have produced shows that there's already a lot of that collaborative learning happening. Now we need to make sure that parents who want to be engaged like this and the kids who want to be engaged like this are getting access to the best, are being choosy, are thinking about privacy implications and have someone by their side to help them. So there's more from New America on this and stay tuned but want to just plant that idea. So now we'll open it up. I want to ask or tap a couple of people just to get the conversation started. So when we're looking at the uses of technology, especially with young people, we want to think about there's three places. Kids are in homes, they're in schools and they're in their communities. So when we look at the communities, the library has been highlighted as a focal point. So I know Pew and John Horgan have done work or research around libraries so I'd be interested to hear how you think this connects with what we're talking about. Thanks very much and thanks very much to the Vickys for such great work. It really is important, Vicky squared for such important work. In terms of what we find at the Pew Research Center on libraries is that they're very important resources for learning but also learning how to use the technology. And when Vicky noted the 43% of respondents in her sample who at least sometimes use the library for tech access, she thought that number was kind of small. I thought it was kind of big. I thought it was important. And to me the least appreciated figure in data analysis is one third. We like to think about majorities but if you think about it, a lot of interesting stuff happens when one third of the population is doing stuff. When one third of the country got internet access, we had the dot com bubble. When one third of the country had broadband access, we had a huge outbreak of new media investment. When one third of the country got smart phones, we had an explosion in app development. So when I see one third or more of people in low-income communities using libraries, it suggests to me that they're critically important resources for learning about technology. To give a quick preview on a data nugget for research coming out of the Pew Research Center in the next couple of months, trust in information is a huge influencer for whether you do adult learning. This will focus on adult learning. And libraries are places where that kind of trust is developed. So investments in formal training, investments in the community institutions, like libraries that provide it, are critically important to drawing people toward learning at any age. Great, thanks. Let me jump, I'm going to remember, but I'm going to jump to Craig and Vicki. Craig Watkins, University of Texas Austin, and Vicki Katz have both done extensive ethnographic research. So I'd be interested in your thoughts on how some of the things that we're talking about, as it relates to parental engagement and children working together, how that syncs up with the ethnographic research that you've been doing over the years. Sure, so I mentioned the year-long ethnography that we did in a school in the Austin Metropolitan Area. We spent most of our time in the school, but we also had an opportunity to go and visit kids in their homes and meet with families. And these are primarily families that's very mature, sort of parallel with the types of families that we've heard here about today. I think the thing that struck us was that the aspirations that these parents had weren't really different than the aspirations that you might see in more affluent kinds of households. And I think your data suggests this, right, that there's a recognition that technology is a potential pathway to opportunity, and so they make enormous sacrifices to get those tools and technologies into the hands and into the homes of their kids. And so it's not necessarily aspirations that are problematic, but rather the larger sort of social and community resources that are huge difference in terms of what those parents are able to tap into. So in that sense, simply because they recognize that technology is important, oftentimes, right, the sort of social networks that they have access to, the kinds of resources that circulate through those networks very significantly from more affluent parents. And so for us, that was something that was quite striking is how do we begin to sort of build an ecosystem that not only supports kids, but also supports parents who have very high aspirations for their kids and parents know better than anyone, right, the importance of education, because most of those parents didn't have the opportunity to pursue education. And so they know just based on their own set of life experiences in ethnography that education could, in fact, be a really important opportunity for their kids. And so for them, the investment in technology, moving around to different neighborhoods to get access to what they perceive to be the better schools, access to better technology, these are the kinds of things that these parents are doing and their kids having better futures. And how can we perhaps build the kinds of resources, community resources that might enable them to pursue those futures? And you highlighted the fact that probably because it's in a low income community that those community resources are much more important and much more needed. So the library really needs to be top notch. Vicki? I'm just going to say one thing because I think you've all heard my voice enough today. But Susan, I was thinking about your work. I'm thinking about the work that we did interviewing families in these three districts and how often we heard from parents, especially in Arizona, that getting broadband access at home was one of the added benefits of that was being able to move out of community spaces and into places where the family could maintain a greater sense of privacy. We're talking about low income Latino families in a place where you'd have to be under a rock not to know that these are families that are under siege with regard to immigration policy. But for low income families that are time crunched, time strapped, what we saw was that one of the many benefits that they saw of home broadband access was that it allowed them to engage privately with no time restrictions in their own space and they saw that as a benefit over being in the library. So it's interesting to think about how what you saw with regard to how engaged families were around technology in the library perhaps looks very different from what families are doing at home in the comfort of their own space because we saw very different things when we moved settings in that way which I think is really, really interesting. Thank you so much. Thank you. Here and then here and then I have to stop because Shayna is going to... I have actually sort of an interesting counter point to Vicki. So as the OTI has done a lot of work through BTOP and through other programs in deep engagement with communities and one thing that I want to emphasize sort of building on John Horrigan's point is the role, and this is a term I mentioned in my opening remarks but with only three minutes didn't have a chance to really explore this idea of social infrastructure and I think Vicki you are clearly representing the findings that you saw for adopters who were ready to move home connections but what we've seen with community anchor institutions of all types including schools and libraries but including other community centers and fixtures within a given area is that those community anchor institutions can provide really robust social infrastructure with the right resources to help people get online. So for the under connected and the unconnected there is a tremendous gateway potential to anchor institutions and one of the things that we've pushed at the federal level is for an inclusive definition of broadband adoption that includes those adopters who have not yet subscribed at home but who have come online via these trusted institutions so it's an important both sort of substantive and language point but also a data point how we calculate adoption rates. Thank you. Hi I'm Mary Alice Ball from the Institute of Museum and Library Services so we do see that libraries play this critical role but it's families that are key so we just announced a new funding opportunity for research grants of up to a million dollars and the focus is on facilitating STEM learning in informal settings children 6 to 10 years old with their families and so the hope is that then the parents can learn skills or older siblings can learn skills that they can then take home and reinforce this learning I do think we recognize that and thank you Susan Newman for all your work and research you know we recognize that we have diverse communities in this country and so we want the research to really reflect those communities excellent yes you can things a little bit in addition to your point is that what we find in our library spaces and we're still doing research in there is that many of our low income parents are computer phobic they're scared they're frightened especially because their children are more proficient than they are so very often it becomes a scary feature to actually get on but what we find that in the library when this occurs as a community activity there are people of different colors and races working together to all become proficient at the same time it becomes a community activity and not an individual activity and I would like to stress the importance of the community in terms of community literacy development and community digital development thank you and that's a great segue to our second topic which is going to focus on reaching under connected immigrant Hispanic families I think we have just talked about some of the resource the community resources whether it's libraries I'm really excited to hear about the new initiatives from IMLS and museums because we know that most of the learning that occurs in the child's life is outside of the school in those non-formal learning environments so we have obviously heard a lot of data in the survey that talks about under connected immigrant families and ask these questions why? why are those families under connected? what can we and should we do about it and also what are some thoughts or some things we should think about as it relates to the research to help answer all of those questions in five minutes is Carmen Gonzalez she is a professor at the University of Washington and is also a part of the research team that worked on the research that we're unveiling here today Carmen Gonzalez first I'm very happy to be here as a researcher it's really exciting to see our work kind of brought to life and in the hands of policy makers and practitioners like yourselves earlier today Vicky Katz talked to us about the qualitative research that we conducted with low income immigrant Latino family specifically she described how parents make calculated decisions about what kinds of technologies they bring into their homes and how they perceive the risks and benefits of technology in general I've been tasked with a very big question about why immigrant Latinos seem to be much less connected than other groups and I want to share some of the stories we heard while sitting in the homes and in schools with over 100 families about 170 families I'm going to rely on a prepared statement to respect the time limit and to effectively represent the voices of the families who have shared their time and perspectives with us first we should consider how structural inequalities shape the realities and decisions of lower income immigrant families we spoke with many parents who were struggling to keep up with the financial demands of connectivity some had purchased devices through high interest financing plans because their credit worthiness had not been established others were ineligible for service contracts including those offered through reduced cost programs because they did not have a valid social services they were able to creatively afford both devices and internet service for their families were often locked into lengthy service contracts with low internet speeds and early termination penalties these and other structural conditions can make connectivity seem like yet another financial trap second immigrant Latinos particularly those living in communities where anti-immigrant sentiments are tangible and even local governments often face a unique set of challenges the threat of off and online surveillance can heighten privacy concerns we spoke with parents who were very confused and scared about what happens to their personal information online and others who shied away from having any kind of online presence because they did not feel safe doing so these fears associated with connectivity are grounded in real life experiences with social distancing legal ramifications and family separation but what we also learned while speaking with families at schools and in their homes were the different ways that immigrant Latinos are engaging technology creatively and resourcefully I can say confidently that all of the parents we talked to believe that technology was important for their children's education and for their future they weren't always sure how it was helping them but they were often sitting right down the way and they were especially willing to make the sacrifices necessary to give their children the best chance possible educational opportunity was after all a motivating factor for their decision to immigrate to the U.S. parents stood in line at schools to purchase a refurbished computer they held onto broken devices in the hopes of reviving them and they shared internet service with their neighbors so that children could complete their homework and perhaps learn how to use this technology engagement among immigrant Latino families is driven by a desire to maintain communication with loved ones children described how they helped their parents learn how to use FaceTime Skype or WhatsApp to connect with family members in Mexico parents some who had no prior experience with computers or the internet had started to explore digital technology when they realized that they no longer had to buy expensive calling cards not surprising to see how families were finding creative ways to be virtually present for significant moments especially when physical reunification was not a possibility as we think about designing initiatives that promote meaningful connectivity it is this creativity and determination that we can harness and build on as a pathway toward digital equity without ignoring structural and political constraints we can work with families to design programs that move beyond access to consider how tech literacy can foster the self-efficacy and empowerment that is vital to building capacity we need long-term sustainable community-based approaches that meaningfully examine the lived experiences of immigrant families and activate the strengths of local assets including educators service providers librarians and community leaders such efforts can get us one step closer to enhancing opportunities for all to provide us with some context and to respond to Carmen's remarks are Mr. Ernesto Villanueva and he is representing the Chula Vista elementary school district where he has served as a teacher he's been a principal he's also been the chief technology officer so Mr. Villanueva well good afternoon everyone I want to again thank Maribel and everyone else in the room for really personalizing this data it's so powerful when you're able to reflect and review what it means and work through what we as practitioners talk about the so what factor okay that's a lot of information we've worked through it we've analyzed it synthesized it so what what does it mean for the child that's sitting there in 2016 and what is it going to mean 20 years from now so I thought about myself and I thought about an English learner along with my my brothers and my parents buying this computer of which they had no idea what it was going to be used for but they did know that it was important for us to have it was probably the largest computer you could ever find with those 200 pound cathode ray tube you know screens that we had and ultimately what we found my brother and I my older brother is that immediately we became the spokesperson the researcher and really the hope for our family all immediately within that purchase and I think many of our parents are in that phase they don't understand why my parents never touched that computer they never sat next to me and said hey can we look this up they didn't know how to turn it on or turn it off what they did know though is that there was an urgency to support the learning of my brothers a total of four so when we look at kind of the boots to the ground and what's happening that urgency is there as a principal I felt it Mr. Villanueva they would say as you give the beginning of the year lists to purchase should I buy an iPad I hear I should buy an iPad you know and when we had those conversations it really struck in me that the families that I I was talking to an iPad would set them back months if not a year and so that's one key piece that I invite you to really walk away with the urgency is there the other is I'd like to share with you if I have as my minute comes up this idea of our parents and and I go back to this example you know when you ask parents if they own a car many would say yes I own a car but when you dig deeper you start to say well maybe some families own multiple cars right but it's not really posed in the question and some have a V8 engine 400 horsepower and others have a two cylinder barely makes it up the hill right everyone is still under that yes I own a car some are traveling in a super highway right and and have the fast pass to get through and others are on one lane just trying to make it through so I like in that type of example to the idea of do you have access yes we have access what type of access and ultimately what is the experience through that access that we're trying to accomplish that's what I appreciate of the conversations this morning is that we don't just focus in on access as the finality but from an educational point of view also we want to build experiences that's what builds learning is those experiences that they're having so I leave you with one question maybe two how do we create collective family learning experiences with our technology tools rather than possibly reinforcing any existing gaps with the still relatively new language of technology also how do we expand the online opportunity and experience for all so that it feels effectively that we are on the same multi lane information highway with high powered fuel efficient vehicles available on demand thank you for your time so when we take those questions and we say well what can we do what should be done I want to go to Jamie the education evangelist at Google you're at the intersection of technology and teaching and learning I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on it yeah thanks actually I was sitting here going I want to talk so badly about this I could see it in your face it came up on Facebook so something that we have to keep in mind here when we think about this when we talk about this is that in 1945 if you were a high potential kid living in poverty minority kid living in poverty in 1945 you had a 6% chance of graduating from college today it's 9% so back in the good old days without technology it was 6% we haven't moved that much in that so the reality is that we're talking about technology we're talking about all these different things but what we should be talking about is what's wrong with the learning models that we have that cause a 9% graduation rate among those things and so what are the things that we can do so technology as the technologist in a room our job is to make that technology invisible easy to use manageable scalable we shouldn't be talking about technology just like we walked in here and the lights worked we didn't talk about no one walked in here said oh my goodness the lights work in here that's amazing right we just wanted to be there invisible yes it should be safe it should be secure it should be private but the reality is that what we really need to think about is changing the learning models that we use because in 2013 one million kids in this country took AP history and 40,000 took AP computer science and out of those 40,000 4,000 were black and Latino and out of those 4,000 I guarantee you that 3,997 of them were like Latina like my daughter who drives a Prius not the real ones that we have to get to in the communities of need and so the reality is that we have to change what it is that we're looking for and the other part of the whole technology revolution what's going on is there's a lack of representation at the technology level of people of color of people of socioeconomic diversity that we need to bring into the group it's an economic thing right for example Latino market is a trillion dollar market and maybe Latino communities aren't using the products and services not because they're not educated but because it doesn't relate to them there's nothing there for them and so what we need to do more in anything is change the learning model so that we get kids of color that we get kids of socioeconomic backgrounds into those positions of power to start driving the products and services that we need and just I'll give you a quick example how we're doing that in Phoenix I live in Phoenix and could talk more about Arizona but the we're building a school called the Phoenix coding academy and we're going to be focused on bringing about 100, 120 Latino kids living in Phoenix through four years of computer science not as a track not as a class but as embedded into their curriculum so it's biology and computer science and history and computer science and English and computer science and we're building that now to show you can have iteration and innovation in education and and we're excited to get those kids out into the community to start building products and services that we actually need in the communities of need that we have great thank you thank you and as we and as we think about diversifying at all levels I want to call on Nicole Turner Lee from the Multicultural Media Telecommunication and Internet Council to talk about what MMTC does and some of the research that you're involved in. Yeah thank you Hey Michael this has been a fascinating conversation I actually have to say being a digital advocate who's done this for 20 years a person who delivered computers into people's homes at one economy corporation prior to the Connect Home Initiative. It's almost like deja vu but I close my eyes I actually see 1996 when Texas implemented the Telecommunications Infrastructure Act and people like Laura Breeden and others were creating electronic communities in Blacksburg's village and I was just a PhD student just following along but I kind of want to add to this diversity conversation at MMTC we're really involved in media advocacy we look at regulatory policy legislative policy we do research I used to be at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies I've worked with John Horrigan where we did the first national minority broadband adoption study that over sampled African Americans and Latinos back in 2009 and I think one of the things and Chairman Willis said it earlier today that I think it's a great way to contextualize this conversation and sort of picking up on what Google said that this digital divide issue that we're dealing with is an issue of the competing forces of social stratification in society so you can't talk about libraries without talking about community infrastructure you can't talk about education without talking about historical discrimination disparities in education can't talk about technology as a tool for healthcare you don't talk about healthcare disparities and chronic illnesses that exist among communities of color you can't talk about educating the parents if the parents don't have a degree and that's part of the challenge you can't talk about you know getting people online if they don't trust the system and they've been surveilled since the 1960s all I'm saying with that is you've got to figure out a way to socialize the conversation where it becomes much more of a national imperative that this is about I think Willis said it right the economic social viability of our society of our nation what are the social dividends economic dividends and the civic discourse dividends that result when we have policies that align with people people that get it and I think back to the gentleman from Google we are producers it is problematic that we have people of color on the fringe and that's where the diversity thing gets a little funny and tricky with us where people on the fringe of the creation of these products and services but they're the major consumers of these products and services and so again I think it's well said to hear from Google I want to go over there and give them a hug you got to hire more people that can actually massage the product so I think to your point Kevin I think it's a mix of complexities that whereas most of us want to say that the digital divide issue becomes less complex we do know more about it but the extent to which we can actually use these as levers to solve the problem which is why I'm really excited about the report it allows us to look at the different verticals we can at least begin to make dense and changes and how we push this but we can't contextualize it outside of larger institutional historical structures that's sort of why my last point a lot of times we have great philanthropy that happens in corporations they often don't work as well as they think they work in the board room only because people are different right Michael right people don't look like what people talk about they have different needs when I was in one economy we bought computers to people's houses this is back in 1999 we delivered the computers with digital connectors we hooked them up to modems we came back a week later and that table was used to put their coffee their breakfast their kids stuff because they didn't have a dresser in their home and so again it's and I like the qualitative side we've got to figure out how to contextualize the debate so I think that's what you want me to answer Kevin if I didn't I'm sure you would have given it to me anyway so we're going to open it up if there are other comments and questions I want to actually while the rest of you are thinking is go to Chique Ago from everyone on Nicole talked about this whole community effort that needs to be embarked upon when we talk about connecting communities and I know everyone on has been at the forefront of that can you shed some light when I usually talk about this work I talk about a movie that I used to watch when I was a kid which is Field of Dreams and if you remember in Field of Dreams Kevin O'Costner hears this voice saying build it and they and then I usually say that it's not the way this works at all you have to bring this to where our people are because frankly there are barriers in the way between the people that we're trying to help and all these things around digital inclusion that are historical and that are systemic so again it is not simply negotiating the offer it's not simply our great nifty platform for folks going online and finding the service it is working with the Boys and Girls Club working with the church working with at times the guy who owns the store the people on the block respect to endorse the program who frankly from here in DC we would know about it's why our part of our secret sauce similar to what Cox says is we are on the ground in five states with regional managers from those communities in Charlotte in Miami who are as Miami and Charlotte as they can be who can go and actually carry this message for that message of trust I use one example from Connect Home which is work that I've led going to convening in Baltimore and the head of the housing authority asking to a group of residents what is the biggest barrier to you being online and this grandmother raised her hand and she said the biggest barrier is trust if you can get someone from my building to come to me and connect me and tell me why this is important and make me feel all the things that we put around privacy that I won't be spied on that my kids will be safe and it actually is going to improve the quality of my life that's where we see it but this is half technology half sociology and when we think about the type of effort that we need to close this gap I think I would have people think about the Affordable Care Act if you think about the Affordable Care Act we put forward however you feel about it a big benefit but the effort required on the ground whether it was ads on the Tom Joyner show it in the morning folks on the ground with health navigators making sure that folks get signed up that's how you get 10, 15 million people signed up that could actually improve the quality of their lives it's not just building they will come you have to bring it to where the people are excellent thank you one and two I'm Angel LaCiefer in May we formed the National Digital Inclusion Alliance for just the year reason that and Nicole was one of our founders just the reason that everyone is describing so we are here to help you right so we are in 32 states we're now up to 155 affiliates because I know a lot of people it's because it's just happening folks who are working on broadband adoption at the local level want to talk to somebody else who's working on broadband adoption at the local level and they want to know what's going on nationally so do you want to reach those folks I'm very excited to connect you to them whether it's locally or statewide or whoever it is because they want to be connected to the resources that are working on these but they don't necessarily know how to do that so it's a great role great yes media mentor with Herefax County and one of the things that we've noticed is when we work specifically with early education is they don't have access to the reduced cost connectivity programs or the reduced equipment programs that you have access to through the public schools so we have relied really heavily on our partnership with the public libraries since anyone can access those services but that is one thing that I would just ask us to consider moving forward is how we can get family home care providers child care providers in preschools connected to these resources so we can start early excellent excellent here and then back there I'm Lindsay T.B. and I work here at New America and to the point that you just mentioned I think one of the things we've talked about here at New America with specifically the E-rate program is how they rely on state definitions of what public school is in order to decide what programs qualify for service so in some states early child care providers actually can receive E-rate dollars as well as juvenile justice programs and many other kind of alternative programs that are in this list of state defined qualifications and so one of the recommendations that we've put out is that the FCC really needs to take a step back and not rely on state definitions of public education but expand their definition all together so that we're not inequitably serving different programs in different states and that students in Alabama can have access and pre-K to the internet but students and for instance Georgia cannot so that's an excellent point and there are real policy solutions that can be taken to address that very big problem. Thank you. Mary Alice Ball from IMLS again I haven't heard anybody talking about Native American, Native Alaskan Native Hawaiian communities and yet they are the most unconnected communities around the country one strategy that we've done as a grant making agency is we've tried to fund projects because trust trust is a huge issue in these communities and so we've tried to fund projects that have kids with iPads running around and interviewing elders and then to capture some of the history of the tribe or we're doing things with digitizing cultural heritage materials at Washington State University Mukatu has a great project that is being taken up by more and more tribes and so the idea there is if we can get the content that makes internet connections more relevant we hope that we can promote adoption. Great. Yes. Question around early childhood education to share one example of how we're doing that in the communities we serve so last year the James M. Cox Foundation awarded a grant to everyone on we're providing 1,500 tablet computers in Macon but what we're piloting is the expansion of eligibility to head start in Macon where the tablets come preloaded with educational software for the teachers and the parents to help improve their digital literacy as well so we're optimistic about this pilot that we would be able to continue to expand our eligibility across all the markets to early childhood education. Great. Cool. I think we can move on to our third and front. I'm hijacking you. No, I just wanted to ask about well John Horrigan I want to call you out a little bit here and the recent Pew Research that came out in December on the Broadband Report and you noted a trend small but statistically significant toward more people being mobile only instead of fewer people being mobile only and I just thought maybe we could talk a little bit about that and maybe also draw Nicole into this and others are we working toward are we moving toward a mindset among many consumers that says mobile only is sufficient my mobile device can do everything and so therefore I don't need to prioritize the home access or prioritize actually having a laptop or a desktop computer and if so is that something we should be working to counter and how do we do so it's kind of the question I throw out to the group to start with you. On what we find in the data should is it a consumer mindset that mobile only is okay if you ask people whether the answer is no. People who are mobile only don't have Broadband mainly because they can't afford it they say they can do a whole lot on their mobile phone but in other research we've done other research I've done if you look at their behavior using mobile only comparing that to people with more tech access resources they're doing a lot less online and they run into data caps and that sort of thing so it's not an adequate substitute so to the extent that mobile is fine policymakers and others need to step back and not worry about access the data doesn't show that that should be the case. Jamie and then Nicole. Just a quick point about mobile access the realization that I know we're Americans we're cool but we're actually cavemen when it comes to the rest of the world when it comes to mobile devices so the rest of the world is moving mobile but we have to define what mobile is. I consider myself a mobile consumer I travel a lot about 150,000 miles a year and I'm online all the time and it's my mobile device that gets me online through a connectivity point through LTE through faster internet access and I still use my laptop connecting through my phone or my iPad or my tablet so we have to define what mobile is. So the rest of the world is operating like that they're using their mobile devices as those points so I'd rather talk about access data in terms of how much data you can actually use on a monthly basis and speed those are the two things that it doesn't matter it shouldn't matter what the device is because you can use a Chromebook you can use a dummy device to connect to that mobile device to use as a typing as a typing solution there's lots of solutions like that. Nicole? I was going to say I love that question because we grapple with it all the time right because mobile has become one of those big drivers primarily because the public policy has lent itself to create lifeline, prepaid wireless it is one of the at the time it was the lowest entry to internet access for low income consumers in particular because you didn't have to be credit worthy once the rules change and you could actually go in and get a prepaid phone that is a bit more collateral. As John said and I think as also mentioned the issue is can a person who is using their mobile device do their homework and that is still a question I'm just going to I always tell people like this my child can't do their homework on a cell phone so I don't think anybody else's family should have to do the same, the question is there are other devices that we're seeing and I think more study needs to be placed on and that's where we'll see in some of the pilots with the connect and program do tablets program. I swear every time I look at him and he does not open a book or pick up a pencil that I worry about his grades and then I see the report card and I realize that there's something to that that I'm missing as an old school paper and pencil kind of person, right? But the challenge again is, and I think John's paper recently really pointed that out for a lot of social justice groups, when people feel that they can, and I think the research here for the paper, when people feel like that you can only do but so much or your data cap or you have to choose between my electricity and broadband, it doesn't matter what device you're on, it's really the limitation of what you're able to do to actually meet the, you know, individual benefit for your child or for your applying to that job, etc. So it's really a question, but it's one of those things that we know because of the regulatory climate in particular, it's just been an easy adoption. And I kind of agree, I think we also have to shift low income people from mobile is just a cell phone. It is a whole lot of other stuff. It's your ability to be mobile by not sitting in the parking lot of a McDonald's per se, but sitting in a library or sitting, you know, in a park or other places that have creatively offered internet service that you can actually take your device and click wherever you have to go. And I think that's really the context again in this conversation of low income people goes back to community infrastructure. So people stop saying that people have Starbucks in the hood. They do not have a Starbucks in the hood, right? They cannot go there. They have to find churches that have internet access. But again, that sense of mobility is so much more powerful. As the chairman said, if we can harness it and understand the specific uses of how it, you know, contributes to benefit. Last last comment for Craig, and then we have one more section. So can I be really quick? So your question is a really interesting one for me. And I wonder if it's not so much about the platform, but rather the skills that the platform oftentimes sort of affords developing. So my concern about the mobile only thing is that often times if you listen to how mobile is marketed in urban communities, it's primarily as a platform for consuming information and content. I think so much of what we are interested in here is cultivating environments and ecologies around the production of content. And when you talk about production of content, if you have only your mobile device as your lifeline, you're not going to pass it back to your child to do scribbling on because it has your bank information and all your bills on it. So it limits and it's expensive. So it limits the use of that actual device in your family. So that's the conclusion of section two. This is final section number three. And this kind of does a really good job of bringing it together where we really are going to look at the social, social economic status, digital media, and participatory research or participatory action research. And the person who we're going to bring forward to talk about this is Dr. Lynn Schofield Clark. She is a professor at the University of Denver. And most recently, she is the author of the parent app, understanding families in a digital age. Dr. Clark. Well, I want to start with the very last line of the study. I thought this was a study that was just amazing. And it was so gratifying, I think as as Maribel and as Ernesto and other people talked about in terms of if you've been studying and have been embedded in communities of color, you see a lot that you can recognize here. And the last line of the study says the solution to this challenge will require innovative partnerships and new commitment, aligning government, industry, education, and community leaders, including families themselves. And so I just wanted to start with a story first that after I had finished my book, the parent app, understanding families in a digital age, I wanted to understand even more about how families experience to themselves in an infrastructure that we've been talking about here. So for the past five years, I've been involved in a project that's called participatory action research. And participatory action research grows out of Latin American traditions of trying to help people follow free airs tradition of helping people to discover their own voice and their own things that they care about to kind of echo some of the things that Mary Ellen had talked about. So what I've been working with is a high school in Denver that has the largest English language learning program. And the school has been interested in we developed an after school program that looks at how we can use media to make a difference in our communities. So it's been an effort to try to develop youth voice and help young people to decide what they want to do with the media that they have access to. So last year, the group decided that they wanted to tackle the issue of students of color and relationships with members of law enforcement. So we brought in the city of Denver as a partner. They have us an office of the independent monitor that is the citizen oversight board that takes in complaints about police. And we had the students get access to cameras. They were able to interview police officers. We visited the police station. We had students interview university students so that they could understand some of the racial disparities and some issues of infrastructure and problems that are of structural racism. And then we had them write a report that the students authored that then ended up informing the way the Denver Police Department is now looking at issues of curriculum to bring kids and cops together to try to understand each other better. One of the students real takeaways is that they got a chance to include implicit bias in the understandings that police officers now go through in the Denver Police Department because they felt so strongly that police needed to understand that in a largely white police department their life experiences were very different than the experiences of young people of color who are growing up in the Denver area. So I wanted to just throw a couple takeaways from this that kind of echo some of the things we've been talking about. One is I think that this study represents a really important way for those of us in the room to begin to shift the public conversation and help everyone to recognize that we cannot expect families to do this alone. That we need to understand family ecologies that include schools and health care providers, social service providers, religious organizations, immigrant support groups and other methods of interfacing with communities that people touch every day in their lives. Second, we all need to seek out cross sector approaches to societal issues. And here I'm echoing things that Chica and Nicole have talked about to talk about how important it is for us to find partnerships that we didn't know might be important to us. Things like bringing together those of us who have been concerned about digital equity issues with those who are involved in city housing and in state organizations about urban planning. And that then leads to a third takeaway, which is that I think we need to develop integrated methods of research and evaluation. That we need to think about the ways that some of these larger organizations are looking at these issues of digital equity as part of an issue that is much broader and that affects societal concerns so that we might be able to ask ourselves broad questions such as, is local capacity grown? How do we measure that in relation to these issues of digital equity programs we're trying to put in place? Is wealth creation in lower income communities taking place? And do existing family members become experts in the ability to define and to approach solutions for what they think are the problems that they're facing in their everyday lives? So my takeaway question is, how do we support local communities in their efforts to leverage digital media in relation to the changes that they want to see and that they believe will support their goals for well-being? Thank you. And responding to Lin's comments is Deb Socia, she has a wealth of experience, grassroots experience dealing with low income families. She is currently the executive director of next century cities and before that she ran the BTOP program called Tech Goes Home, which was in Boston. So I bring to you now Deb Socia. Wow, I feel like I have so much to stay and I'm last. I could stay up here for an hour. So at next century cities, I think with that head on I want to mention that we should not forget that two million Americans only have the option of dial up or satellite. That's two million Americans, primarily rural, but that that impacts the circumstance significantly as well and I know you mentioned that this morning. I will say that having been a teacher, a principal, run a digital inclusion project and doing the work I do now to help cities get fast, affordable and reliable broadband, I have an unusual experience, an unusual set of experiences, but the research that we're hearing about today so matches my personal experience that I'm really excited. I'm also excited that we're all here today talking about it. It's pretty interesting for me to be in the circumstance. I want to respond to a few folks. First, Ernesto's comment about the the urgency parents feel. I so resonate, my experience so resonates with that and what I experienced with our families was they had two, there was a continuum. They were fearful and wouldn't let their kids touch it or they left them alone and ignored them and let them do whatever they wanted and they need our help to figure out that middle space. And to speak to Craig's comment on mobile data, primarily cell phones, use of cell phones, I think of a cell phone as the cliff note version of a text book. It's helpful, it's not going to give you the depth of experience that the textbook would and which of us would say it's okay to give some of our kids cliff note version of a really good novel. I don't think we'd accept that and yet we do somehow. Regarding parent engagement and student achievement, I want to speak a bit to what Chikay said about the importance of trust in our communities and a comment I often share which has, I don't know who made the comment in the first place, I didn't make up the saying but it's progress happens at the speed of trust and I take that seriously and we really need to think about that when we work in communities, low-income communities. So the final thing I wanted to comment about and that's the comment about there are no Starbucks in our low-income communities but there are McDonald's and those McDonald's often have free Wi-Fi and so there was a great article a while back called homework with a side of fries. We need to be avoiding that as the only option for our children when they have homework to do after the library is closed. And to comment back to Lynn, this is a complex problem, we know it's a complex problem, lots of folks want to say there's an easy, cheap, fast solution out there and they're all wrong, right? This is a complex problem and complex solutions are required to resolve them. So thank you all very much. Thank you. Is Joshua Kramer here? Okay, so I wanted to actually get your take on things. Joshua Kramer is with the National Center for Families Learning and he does a lot of work with collaboration and kids and parents learning and working together. So I'd be interested in your thoughts on how all of this connects to the work that you do. Thank you very much and I would just echo what many of you have said, this has been a great forum for discussion and at NCFL, we've worked for 26 years in engaging the family unit around educational issues and in particular working with hundreds of thousands of low income ethnically diverse families with community partners like schools, libraries, community organizations and of course in the last several years we've seen a lot of the changes that you all have talked about today and that we've discussed and so our work over the last three years has focused heavily on engaging families together around technology and our independent evaluation results from Penn State University have shown us that when we work in that concerted fashion building both adult capacity and child capacity and really rallying around the idea of families learning together we change behavior around technology and so it's about more than access. We start seeing technology being used for educational purposes and all those great things we talk about here and so we're very heartened by I think finding number seven in the report that talks about low income families that spend a lot of their time learning together and we really want to maximize that and encourage a dual generation approach. So thank you all for your work. One other person I want to highlight and give them the opportunity to provide their feedback is Michael for Gail from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting because we've been talking about technology and we've been talking about communities and we've been talking about learning but a key component is content because you get everybody connected then what? What are they consuming? Right? You know, I had to forbid my kid my daughter from watching certain shows because she's a tween and there's some shows that she's not going to watch in my house but when we look at the role that public media can play in this conversation I'd be interested to hear from you. Thank you Kevin. Hello everybody. This has been incredible and I'm sort of hesitating about what to say because I'm really absorbing what everybody has said and agreeing and sort of thinking trying to how we're going to transform our thinking in our projects that have been public media so to say a little bit about how we think about content is all in the morning I was thinking about connectivity and the so what, right? So yes, it's important to have the infrastructure and the broadband and we do not argue with that but it's what happens after that's done when the connect dead and the connect home have succeeded which we know they will what happens after and that really is helping parents sort of be the kind of mediators of their kids learning experience as much as possible but understanding that it's not just the parents, right? So we in public media have gone through this kind of I've talked about this before at other settings like this this really incredible evolution which I think we learned from a lot of you in the room and we learned together with a lot of you in the room which is we kind of tried to we kind of used to write in on the on the white horse and say you should read to your kids 10 minutes a day, right? And not understanding who it was we were delivering that message to so we know that now, right? The other big lesson is that we each of us individually can't do it individually just like parents can't do it alone so we have to understand what our competencies are and in public media our competencies are creating really good quality educational-based content but understanding that we have to work with the churches and with the other groups that we're not a school, right? We're not a parent we're not but we can help those so my take away from today among many is understanding need and understanding how we all need to work together and I think we do but I think we need to take it a step further that's my challenge like none of us own this problem but we all own the solution right? So how do we look at each other differently? What can we be providing? IMLS and public media 12, 15 years ago worked on a project called partnership for a nation of learners where results are still happening today we're in Utah water authorities are being impacted because of the project that informed the community about and gave them the knowledge that they could act on so I'm kind of going off on a tangent here but it's just like the challenge for me is like how do we look at each other differently so that we can all own the solution to these problems all right excellent excellent so my yes one additional Danny from Common Sense Media one additional content and I agree with many most of the comments that have been made one of the things that we work on and other people in this room probably do too is digital citizenship so one of the content things I just felt like I should mention before the day is over is looking for jobs doing education all of the important reasons why we want connectivity and then when people have increasing amounts of connectivity that they hadn't had before giving them the training to be safe, smart and ethical online is a really important issue especially for children young children you know older elementary school and middle school students are really receptive to this there's great curricula out there and so that's I just wanted to raise that so that it's part of the conversation and one other thing I just wanted to mention about how to reach out to communities some of you may know this but Unibis Yon has been doing a great program along with Common Sense called Avanzamos Connectados and that's one way to reach out to the Latino community and say this is why broadband is important and also here are some ways that you can get connected and they've been having some success in that you mentioned Charlotte I think that's one area where they've been working with one of their stations there where they've been really proactive in community outreach not just sort of putting something up on TV but actually getting people out into the community and helping to connect them with distributors for low cost or free equipment and training Jamie and then Maribel so I just want to say something that'll make everybody mad so we've been talking a lot about digital citizenship is important but what I want to focus on is digital leadership so that and why I focus on kids and not so much parents is because we got to recognize that a lot of our solutions are self-reflective and culturally reflective and in other words one of the reasons why I don't necessarily focus on parents so much is because one a lot of kids who are growing up in poverty don't have parents who care enough to even be engaged and so that's an issue so we have to think about that so a lot of the things that we talk about with parent engagement doesn't pertain to communities that I care about number one and number two is even when we do have educated you know technically savvy parents you have things like groups of parents who aren't vaccinating their kids and other parents who believe that the world is flat and other parents who believe that you know that the government is dropping little white things on our heads and creating sensors on us right so so just keep in mind that what I want what I think why I think we need to focus on kids in our schools because we got to give them the skills there so that they become digital citizens and digital leaders so that they learn how to be part of the solution so that they're creating and developing solutions and that's why I want to focus on computer science so one thing the last thing I'll say when engagement with parents is I spent a lot of time in the community in the Latino community talking to parents about you know the future of the world and where computer science plays a role in that and that the success that parents think about being a doctor or being a lawyer or being a that world is going away and being replaced by professionals who wear baseball caps and ride skateboards and I let them know that my mother is still waiting for me to be successful you know she wants me to be a lawyer right like I think she lies to everyone and tells everyone I'm a lawyer not a chief guy at Google so the so it's important to think about those cultural reflections when we think about the policies and the solutions that we come up with when it comes to parent engagement that's a totally separate conversation okay we'll close out with Marybell that was not intentional by the way so a few things that just keep popping into my head I mean I'm hearing access I'm hearing equity I'm hearing you know one approach you know sort of all encompassing that it's not just a one issue but so I think for me trying to figure out what the goal is and then being able to walk backwards right so I sort of look at a problem and think about where are the gaps what do we need to get there and so I think we can wear our policy advocacy hats our policymaker hat our advocacy hat and the role that I play at the Department of Education at the with the White House Initiative is looking at what do I need to be able to sit at the table and contribute and inform policies and programs to reflect of what the needs are so I think for us to ask ourselves what do we need the one thing that I keep coming across is that the data is not disaggregated the data that does exist and the research that does exist it's not just disaggregated enough to look at the different nuanced populations that make up the Latino community and that's why I keep pointing to the work that you're doing because it takes efforts like that to be able to arm ourselves with the right research and the right data to say hey here's this information so that we can tailor our approaches to meet the needs of those communities and this applies to the Asian American community as well because they're often grouped in a bubble and there there are issues and there the concerns that you know matter to that community is not the same so I want to continue to for us to think about so not only what role do we play but what do we need to be able to get to that goal great well thank you and this and this your comment actually connects to African American communities we tend to lump them together and I'm working on a study with a colleague and we went out and surveyed African Americans and we got some people identifying themselves as Caribbean as African and so we have to make sure that as we do this work we actually clearly identify people so in closing I do want to say that I thank you all for taking the time out of your schedule to come thank you for the lively and intelligent conversation thank you to Michael and Vicky and Vicky and Vicky is going to close it out you guys need a nickname like V2 or something but thank you you thought you were out of here um it's my honor to get to close out what's been a morning that's been one of the highlights of my professional life and I thank all of you for being here I want to thank Vicky writeout not just for all the work that she's done on the survey and this report and what a pleasure it's been to write and work with her but for leading the effort to organize this forum I want to thank Lisa Guernsey and her team at New America for hosting us in this beautiful space for giving us the opportunity to get together and to do this and for all the millions of ways she contributed to making today successful that I'm not even aware of thank you Michael Levine for being and the Cooney Center and his folks there for being the best research partners one could hope for and for everything you've done to bring this forum to fruition and the enthusiasm you've shown and for everything that you do thank you and your team and Alexi and Carmen for all the work that they've done and for a lot of people who aren't in this room and all the contributors who were part of this today and to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for funding work that took them out of their comfort zone and let us do something that I really hope is going to be valuable some of you know this some of you don't I was born and raised in South Africa and when you grow up in South Africa you learn a few things that are really useful one of them is that the most dangerous place that you can possibly stand is between a hippopotamus and water the second most dangerous place I think is between a group of hungry tired people and lunch so I am going to make this very short and sweet but I do want to close out with a few things that I think are key ideas that we've been talking about today and things that we should be thinking about I hope going forward one of the things that comes out of our study that I think is really important is that access if it was ever a yes or no question is no longer that it's about who's most likely to be under connected and what it means to be under connected what it means when your access is intermittent rather than consistent what it means when it's slower than it should be for you to be able to do the things you want to do when you don't have enough devices and you're sharing them amongst too many people or they're old and outdated and they're just not working as well as they could be all of these things and many more that we talk about in the report really matter for parents for children and for overall family well-being because digital equity is so tied and we've talked about this in so many ways today to social equality and efforts towards social equality we think this is a much more useful framing than the digital divide and I think and we think that for a few reasons first of all we've been talking about a digital divide since the 90s the technological environment is changing so rapidly that we can barely keep our hands on it and yet the notion of a divide where there are people who are on one side of it and people who are on the other side is so entrenched and intransigent that it just doesn't fit how quickly the environment moves the idea of being under connected is dynamic it's movable right and I think we need a new framing because the divide's not getting us as far as it should be so if we think about it in this way and we think about the differences and the different dimensions of being under connected there are also multiple ways as Nicole Turner-Lee said so much better than me a little while ago there are different ways to attack this problem we don't have to attack the whole beast at once so we can we can look at slow connectivity speeds we can look at the cost of hardware we can look at skills training we can look at different things and address them one at a time and we can do that in ways that are locally situated one of the things one of the things about doing this study in the way that we did that we started at the local level talking to families understanding them on their own terms giving them an open-ended form to give us a real look and insight into what their experiences were and we've been talking about parents today but we talked to their kids too and you get a lot of very interesting insights about the difficulties related to digital equity when you're talking to six, seven, eight-year-old and a 13-year-old because they're going to tell you things their parents don't and we got to start there and cost is implicated in a lot of ways that families are under connected but it's not the only thing the local partnerships and the local level issues matter a lot we've- Carmen and I've written a paper about how the local level differences mattered for how families made decisions about adoption everybody that's talked today so eloquently about why the local connections and knowing who to talk to in the community matters if you're going to build trust these are things that we really need to think about their crucial community organizations libraries the hardware store owner whoever it is that helps you do the good work that you're trying to do and allows you to make the community meaningful partners in what you're doing is so important it's that building of the hard work of trust and it's more than hardware and it's more than the wiring it's about what can be done to support the learning that's already occurring within families and I can't stress this enough because these are families that we've been talking about today that are lower income and even calling them lower income families defines them by a deficit and they are so often defined only by their deficits whether it's a deficit in income in education in language in experience we have gotten so used to talking about what these families don't have that it becomes far too easy to forget what they do have and Ernesto made some points earlier that were so eloquent and so important Maribel did the same this is about trust this is about pride this is about people who've already done a lot of hard work to get their kids where they are and they're not afraid of doing more of it and talking about people by their deficits doesn't allow us to see what strengths and assets are already in place in these families what they are doing together is powerful the data that we shared with you today and that's in the report both quantitatively and qualitatively that we can see just how frequently and intensively parents are helping kids engage to learn with and through technology how much children are helping their parents to do this which is not a cause for alarm that shows that there is something very deep and meaningful going on in these intergenerational exchanges that we shouldn't condemn as being different but rather harness as a strength what siblings are doing together and that they do more of it in families that have lower parental education and less household income there's compensating mechanisms going on here and if we keep thinking about them in terms of their deficits we risk missing their strengths and we lose the possibility of giving them the dignity of being partners in the change that they want to see for themselves and I think that the core of any policy of program development that the work we're doing here and that we've talked through today and the evidence that we're putting forward I hope that that's going to be what's at the core of it we've done our best even at a national level in a survey to keep the voices of families central to what we're looking at to keep their experiences central to what we're talking about and it's about human connectivity it's about it's not just digital connectivity right it's about trusted intermediaries and anchor institutions and going to people where they are and working with them to do the things that they wish to do this was the first national nationally representative survey of low income parents about issues to do with technology it's six percent of the U.S. population but it's an incredibly important six percent it's the six percent we're usually talking about when we talk about digital equity but we've never looked at them on their own terms right we've looked at lower income Americans and technology use but that includes a lot of single people it includes a lot of elderly people their needs are important too but this population that's raising the next generation and has these hopes and dreams for mobility for their kids this group is central to what we're thinking about when we think about digital equity in a very real way looking at low income families on their own terms instead of looking at income in a very as a variable when we look at technology use amongst U.S. families is really important because this is the first time that we can look at the challenges the concerns the dreams the hopes that low income families have related to technology use and what it can do for their kids and what risks it offers and what opportunities it does it's the first time we can look at them on their own terms and that is incredibly important because we risk all kinds of misconceptions when we hold these families to a middle class majority culture standard that they may never hit because it's not their standard it's not the reality and it's not the reality of most American families raising children today so reframing the discussion not just around digital equity but about how we treat families and what's considered adequate parental engagement maybe we're just missing what that looks like because we're using measures that weren't designed for these populations but we're not going to know that till we talk to the families so digital equity opportunity for all let's take the question mark off of it let's work together to make something better because we can do better and we must do better because the next generation of kids is counting not just on their parents not just on their communities but on the leadership in this room to make it better so thank you to all of you for everything that you're doing I hope we'll keep working together and continue these conversations and push people to have conversations that they are uncomfortable having about these issues because we've got to get uncomfortable if we're going to make change it's the only way we ever do so stick around grab some lunch grab lunch to go but let's keep talking about this and continue the conversation grab some reading material on your way out grab an extra copy of the report and thank you so much to all of you for being with us today