 Good morning. It's such a pleasure to see so many friends and colleagues. I'm Michael Levine. I'm the executive director of the John Gaines CUNY Center Access me workshop and For those of you who are not familiar and one thing that I love about this convening is that I don't know so many of you The CUNY Center conducts and translates research on innovations in digital media in partnership with scholars industry and policy experts in order to advance educational opportunities for all children Today we take up a critical national concern digital equity Tragically millions of families and their children are not gaining access to or fully participating in the vast educational and economic opportunities of our digital age Thanks so much to all of you for traveling from California from Louisville, Kentucky. I said that I said that wrong As leaders in the many different pivotal sectors from media production to research Educational practice to policy you will know I hope we hope that today's conversation will be a little bit more diverse than your typical DC convening and that's by design to make progress in promoting digital equity The sector's representatives room must be aligned in action and mobilized for change We're especially grateful to our two Vickie's Vicki write-out and Vicki Katz who I think have authored a very compelling study that has inspired this convening Let me also thank the Gates Foundation for the generous support and Lisa Guernsey, Shayna Cook and the entire great team here at New America for being so gracious and hosting us Thank you And of course I need to recognize I want to recognize the amazing CUNY Center team led by Catherine G Erica Rabner and Lily Titunis for their superb work and hosting and planning this forum So the conversation today because I have to use this It's focused on opportunity for all and the value of technology in promoting learning pathways for lower-income families an important backdrop is our increasingly robust understanding about how and when to Launch a lifetime of learning through optimal conditions at home and in the community settings In which children spend Many of their waking hours while an ongoing investment. I will argue in school reform remains critical A premise of today's form is that in an anytime anywhere technology environment We are currently missing key opportunities to build a stronger foundation for learning outside of school So let's take a quick look at just how little time is spent By America's children in formal learning environments this slide from the Life Center Documents that can you believe it less than 20% of all waking hours are spent in formal learning Over a lifetime and even less so in the preschool years And of course our national investments are not aligned with the data on this chart and our lousy Outcomes on numerous educational benchmarks show the lack of a strategy to link together children's learning opportunities Clearly we need some new tools and some new ideas to do so The research work that we're discussing today then begins with a focus on learning in the home In the evolving role for modern tools of learning By studying parents and children's changing routines around technology use and know this isn't my dissertation chart It's something that we put together But we are focusing on actually one of my mentors Yuri Bronfrenbrenner from Cornell's pioneering research on family ecological systems tracking the different influences that shape optimal development including parent-child interactions the role of peers Schools and the media each is critical in developing the right connective tissue and guided pathways for academic and social success So at the CUNY Center, we're prioritizing Three key issues which I think are important context for today's forum First we need new public awareness new industry incentives and improved professional practices To better integrate technology and digital media forms that are linked To positive educational outcomes and healthy development for children and youth Second we need a much deeper and more precise understanding of the evolving nature of family interactions with media that is where are the best opportunities and Situations for families to learn together with media what scholars called joint media engagement and third We need to better understand cultural diversity in the new media environment and take actions to Tap into family assets that have not been typically promoted So to help so to help propel action on these three challenges. We simply need to know more Inspired by the work of scholars such as the ones that we will be listening to today in the fields of child development communications and learning sciences We've organized what I think is an exciting alliance that's releasing studies and practical tools through something We call the families and media project and you will be seeing members of what we call the fam-fam today We're delighted to connect leading scholars and media experts from across the country and to be working with other early educational literacy organizations and really thank you so much to so many of you who came here today So the reason sorry So the research that we're discussing today and we're releasing today just to sum up heads for goals First this is the beginning of what we hope will be a vigorous and robust national debate Second we do intend to inform policy Third we have many media developers and designers here and we want you to think about these findings in the context of your products and programs and Finally, we'll be doing follow-up work to translate the research in resources for parents and educators to promote more quality interactions as the findings of our research and that of many others make a Abundantly clear and you all know this the influence on families The influence of technology on families learning and communications is certainly here to stay So to get our form started it gives me great pleasure to introduce Vicky or Victoria write-out and Vicky Katz the co-authors of opportunity for all Most of you in this room know Vicky write-out, but let me tell you just a little bit about her She is in my estimation the nation's leading expert on children's media use digital equity and social policy Central to her remarkable track record has been an unrivaled devotion to developing new methods of inquiry in assembling forceful evidence for needed reforms Many of you are familiar with her work at the Kaiser family foundation Where she directed a series of path-breaking studies that catalyzed the national debate on the impact of the evolving media landscape on children's learning and health She will share the quantitative findings from a survey we conducted last year and then be followed by her co-author Dr. Vicky Katz of Rutgers University who co-designed the survey and also directed a series of complementary field studies in three states Dr. Katz is a pro no slouch herself She's a professor at Rutgers a senior research scientist. I am proud to say at the Cooney Center she will be a Russell sage fellow coming this summer And she's the author of a book that you should get Called kids in the middle how children of immigrants negotiate community interactions for their families Their remarks will be followed by a very nice treat We'll have the pleasure of hearing Sesame Workshop CEO Jeff Dunn and FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's perspectives on the new research We'll then commence with an interactive forum and Conversation to amplify the report's main themes and findings moderated by my colleague Lisa Guernsey and my colleague Kevin Clark From George Mason University. They in our six discussion provocateurs who are going to stick to the time limit Are looking forward to stimulating your reactions and developing Substantive action steps to help us respond to the new evidence Far too many families in America are in the ranks of a phenomenon. We are referring to as the under Connected but now Vicky right out and Vicky Katz. We're all eager to hear about the findings. Thank you very much Good morning, and thank you all for being here. I'm Vicky right out and my purpose here today is to present to you the results of a Quantitative national survey we did with lower-income families with young children Looking at issues of digital connectivity use of digital media for educational purposes and so on So our goal with the survey was to focus in like a laser beam on those for whom we think The issues of digital connectivity are most important and that is Families that are in the bottom half of the income nationally and with young children school-aged children between the ages of six and 13 years old We were We were there we go I'm going to go back one for you We were really delighted to be able to do a nationally representative telephone survey with the research firm SSRS We had nearly 1200 respondents They're all parents with children between the ages of six and 13 and they were all below the national median income for families with children this age The median is actually about 64,000 and our cutoff was 65,000 and Given the size of our sample We actually had a pretty robust sample of families who were below the federal poverty level So we look at results like that and also between a hundred and a hundred and eighty five percent of poverty In addition given the racial and ethnic makeup of families under the median income level We also had a pretty robust sample of low and moderate income Hispanic parents about we have more than 350 which allowed us to look within the Hispanic population and Compare immigrants to those born in the US and Spanish dominant to English-speaking parents as well So in this study, we're looking at whether families have their own way of accessing the internet So when we talk about whether a family has quote any internet access We're talking about folks who have a computer with internet service at home or a mobile device Like a smartphone with a data plan We use the term home access to define those who have a computer and internet service plan at home and The term mobile only access to include those who don't have a computer and internet service plan at home But do have a smartphone or tablet with a data plan So now to our findings The first thing that really stands out and and I have been doing research in this field for a long time And it's so it's pretty stunning to me is that the vast vast majority of parents even among The bottom half income-wise in this country even among those who are living below the federal poverty level have some type of internet access Today it's 94% of all families below the median income and 91% of those below the federal poverty level So that is a pretty dramatic statistic But these families have many different types of connections and we took a look at that as well Sorry my confidence monitor is a little bit behind the screen there, so I'm going to go back there. Sorry about that So as you can see here There are some who have high-speed home access That's two-thirds of all of those under the median income, but it's only 35% of immigrant Hispanics in this In this income bracket. There are some who have dial-up access at home and some who have mobile only access um Many of these parents and hence their children are what we are now calling the Underconected and that includes all of those who have either no access at all Dial-up access or mobile only access and so when you add all of that together You find that a third of families under the median income are either not or under are not connected or under connected Half of those who are living in poverty are under connected and two-thirds of immigrant Hispanic families are Underconected and that's the issue that we want to highlight here today. So today our feeling is The notion of internet connectivity is no longer just a black-white Yes, no on-off question It is more of a continuum and it is a more nuanced situation And that's why we think the nature of people's connectivity is important and actually has an impact in reality Many more than that Percentage are actually under connected in that they experience a variety of types of limitations and interruptions in their service So for example among those with home access a third say their internet services too slow a Quarter say too many people are sharing one computer So they can't get the time on it that they need and one in five say they've had their internet service cut off at home At least once during the past 12 months due to difficulty paying the bills So these two are part of the broader community of under connected families and among those with mobile only access There are similar issues with many hitting data limits in the past year Having their phone service cut off in the past 12 months because of problems paying bills Or having too many people sharing one device to be able to get the time on it that they need and As you've seen from some of these previous slides Another one of our findings is that the population that is most likely to be under connected is families headed by Immigrant Hispanics, so when you look at any of these data by race and ethnicity and you compare Whites blacks and Hispanics in the same income categories You see Hispanics having lower levels of connectivity But if you look closer, you see that there are almost no statistically significant differences between Whites blacks and us born Hispanics The real difference is among the immigrant Hispanics where rates of access are much lower So for example, as you can see here One in five immigrant Hispanic parents say they don't go online at all And that's whether through a computer or a mobile device whether at home or at the library at work Even occasionally and that's much higher than for other folks in this same income group The rates for having a mobile only connection are much higher among immigrant Hispanics as well 41% have mobile only access compared to much lower levels for others in this income category and Almost half of immigrant Hispanic parents say they never use computers again, not even occasionally This is a question borrowed from Pew Whether at work school library home a friend's house wherever and that compares again to 17% of white and black parents and 19% of us born Hispanic parents We also found that the main reason some families aren't connected that they don't have Home access a computer and internet access at home is money It's not at least among this population among families with young children It is not that they're not interested. It's not that they don't see the relevance It's not that they don't understand how important it is for their kids education We asked this question as an open-ended question To those who didn't have internet service at home why they didn't and so we we didn't give them categories to choose from We let them describe in their own words And you can see that by far the most common reason is that it's too expensive Far more than the proportion who said they don't think they need it or it's because they can access it through other Devices and so on however one thing that we did notice is that nearly one in ten if you look at the second to last Bar there do say that they're not online at home because they don't have good enough internet service available in their community So in terms of getting the pipes and the lines to communities that that is important as well so Money is the main issue inhibiting connectivity at home But we also found that thus far very few families have been reached by the low-cost options that some providers are Offering to low-income families So as you know some service providers are offering discounted low-cost plans to bait that are based on income eligibility and Sometimes this is done voluntarily such as Cox's connect to compete plan sometimes It's done as a result of a requirement in something like a merger or acquisition deal as with Comcasts internet essentials, but we found that among those who would qualify Qualify based on their income that is those who are below a hundred and eighty five percent of poverty Which is the level that's frequently used to define eligibility only six percent had been reached by these plans Now of course those without home access do have other options as well such as using libraries and We found that among those without a home computer or an internet service plan at home 43% of kids and 29% of parents Often or sometimes use computers and the internet at public libraries so I'll be interested to see what people make of that maybe during the discussion whether that's a good result They're not so good results a majority of those who don't have connections at home are not using the connections at libraries some are a Few are using it often, but it's not a lot It's not showing up on the slide here But it's about eight percent of parents and fourteen percent of kids who are often using these services at the library We did find that parents and kids help each other with technology quite a bit So with seventy seven percent of parents helping their kids 53% of kids helping their parents and 81% of kids helping each other where there's more than one kid in this age group in the family So there's a lot of collaborative learning going on in these families and Interestingly this type of collaborative learning is especially predominant and less advantaged homes where we see The children really stepping up to the plate to help their parents and help each other So the kids with less highly educated parents are more likely to be teaching their parents things about technology and Similarly those kids who are in lower-income families are more likely to be teaching each other about technology So kids are stepping in as intermediaries to help facilitate learning Now as far as what families who are connected are doing with the internet among the low and moderate income parents They're basically going online for the same things everybody else's and what you would expect them to such as getting news and information Connecting with family and friends paying bills shopping and applying for jobs and services and Digital technology is also being widely used by children in these lower-income families for educational purposes Most prominently of course for doing homework almost a necessity these days But also for connecting with teachers and working on projects together with other students So you do see technology being used to facilitate newer ways of learning that is collaborating with other students For making homeschool connections for kids You know the student-driven learning kids looking up things that they're interested in and so on But one thing that we did find is that for those whose access at home is based on mobile only the only way They get online at home is through a smartphone or a tablet possibly one of their parents They are less likely you can see a pattern in which they are less likely to engage in some of these activities both the parents and the children and This indicates to us that not having an actual computer and not having actual internet service at home is Limiting parents and kids online usage so as you can see here There's a 30 percentage point difference in parents likelihood to shop online where they might be able to be finding some better prices There's a 25 percentage point difference in online bill paying and banking their parents are 14 percentage points less likely To apply for jobs or look for services online if their connection is mobile only and their children are Quite a lot less likely to go online when the access is only through a mobile device It's basically about a 20 percentage point difference in the percent of kids who are going online on a daily basis If their connection is mobile only and in a similar proportion difference in The frequency of kids just going online just to do that kind of informal learning where they're looking up things that they're interested in So these are some of the issues that we'll be Exploring in our discussion today what it means to be under connected and what can and should be done to expand home access For all children so that this technology can help reduce and not exacerbate educational and economic inequality and with that I will close and I am going to turn the podium over to my colleague Vicki Katz Who's going to present to you some of the qualitative research that she did as part of this research project as well Thank you very much Taking the time limit very seriously So thank you very much to everybody for being here today The survey reports that we're releasing are actually the second stage of a larger study looking at how low-income families make decisions about Adopting technology and integrating them into family life and learning activities what I'm going to do today is Briefly explain the first stage of the study how it's related to the survey We're releasing today and a few of the key findings from that from that project I want to start by giving just a little bit of context for why I began conducting the study in the first place We've seen efforts over the last number of years to address digital inequality when it comes to learning opportunities in schools and those Efforts have been incredibly successful by any measure connect Ed is reporting that over 99% of the nation's classrooms are now connected to broadband So now attention began turning to connection at home And how connectivity outside the classroom Relates to the opportunities the kids have to learn not just in school But as Michael pointed out given that kids spend a fifth of their time in classrooms Opportunities to learn in different places and to connect their learning in different places Connect to compete which you'll be hearing more about throughout the day from and from Zach Levin to help get it off the ground At that time was the only national level effort to connect students at home My goal in conducting this project was to understand how families Respond to digital equity initiatives that were being offered to them at national levels But also at district and state ones and so between July of 2013 and February of 2015 I led a very talented team of student researchers and was helped in that effort by two of my Fabulous colleagues and co-authors of the reports from these studies Carmen Gonzales who you'll hear from later and Alexia reynaal And we together Conducted open-ended interviews with parents and children who are in the same age range as the survey in three Demographically similar communities in Arizona in California and in Colorado all three of these districts were prioritizing tech initiatives of various kinds And that included rolling out to connect to compete So we knew that they had at least one opportunity for low-income families to get online via subsidized Broadband all three districts were majority Hispanic and more than three-quarters of kids in the schools where we did interviews were on free or reduced cost lunch We focused on districts that were specifically Mexican heritage rather than Latino as a broader category Because this is the group of us children that is the fastest growing but also the most likely to be growing up in poverty And to have parents with less than a high school diploma We adopted a rapid approach to qualitative data collection Spending two to three weeks in each site and interviewing 50 to 60 families in each site We interviewed parents and children separately for about an hour each in their language of preference Open-ended questions at home or at school depending on where they were comfortable We asked how they made decisions about adopting technology How connectivity affects family relationships learning activities at home and around the community and Connections to local services and resources that help their families Part of each questionnaire was tailored to each site asking parents and children to reflect on technology Initiatives that were available in their local districts, which in some cases were one-to-one laptop programs moves to standardized testing being online and so forth in total we interviewed 170 families and That was a total of 336 interviews with parents and kids open-ended Alexia and Carmen and I spent an enormous amount of time as you can imagine analyzing those interviews And once we had done that we returned to the schools to discuss the data and our findings with parents and children that we'd interviewed and With administrators to get their feedback and responses to what we found Our findings also informed the survey questionnaire that we developed which you've now heard Quite a bit about as you can see from the report the response categories for most of the questions are a little bit more Descriptive than you usually see in a survey. That's not because we came up with them on our own It's because we took the responses that were most common amongst families We'd interviewed and used those as the response categories in the survey So the study is unusual because the survey itself is directly informed by the voices and opinions and experiences of Families we were most interested in it's an inductive process to creating a survey instrument I'm going to overview three Themes from the findings and I promise it'll be brief. I could go on and on about it, but I won't The first is that I want to give you a sense of how families made decisions about adopting technology And what we found was that contrary to what would be the case if low-income families were in fact on the quote-unquote Wrong side of a digital divide is that technology rich media environments were the norm rather than the exception As Vicki noted in the survey results We found as well that most interviewed Families had been online for years and that they had multiple internet capable devices Even if their connectivity was not constant and even if they shared devices amongst a number of family members Or those devices were slower than they want they wished they were Since families couldn't afford everything they desired they developed creative strategies in order to afford new technologies Is this quote from one of our parents? shows It sometimes involved sacrifices that the family decided on together for those of you at the back of the room what it says Translated into English is my son shows not to get a Christmas gift in order to have the internet because we couldn't give gifts If we had to pay for the internet the children decided which expense to make Right, so when you're looking at lower-income families the choices that they have to make between options are more obvious than they are in high-income Families because there's limited discretionary income it tells you more about their priorities in this quote Which is reflective of what we saw in many families shows that the decisions that are being made about what to sacrifice Are being made with parents and kids together. It also shows what a high priority is being placed on having internet at home We also found that that parents are making carefully calibrated decisions about what risks and rewards adopting technology offered their kids Overall the rewards that they viewed for their children in terms of the educational opportunities. They provided Overrode any risk But in one district where laptops came home with kids through a once-one laptop program They managed their concerns about schools surveillance through these devices by limiting their use to only completing and submitting homework the results of the fear-inducing language in the Contract that parents had signed meant that the laptops didn't meet their full potential to become a device that the entire family could benefit from So this is a quote from one of the moms saying once they do their homework The computer is turned off put back in the case and you don't get it until you go to school They'd use other devices to connect to the internet other than homework Which further reified the divide the divide between what kinds of technologies are for formal learning in school And what's for fun, which is the absolute opposite of what a program like that intends to do for families We also found that subsidized internet programs that were aimed at this population. We're not reaching their potential Consistent with the survey findings our interviews revealed that connect to compete was being broadly underutilized by families a qualified for it as All 170 families that we interviewed did they all qualified financially for connect to compete Programs only 37 of the families were signed up for connect to compete's broadband offer across our three sites And only eight of the hundred and seventy families were going online for the first time Why was the program a mismatch for their needs these families had more experience and more devices than the programs designers had Anticipated an internet offer that offered them an ethernet cord connection to a single device Was simply not reflective of the family's needs as we've discussed many of these families have mobile access and many mobile devices And ethernet cords simply wasn't it wasn't enough And this representative quote from one of the mums talks about the speeds also being too slow for the kinds of activities that families routinely did online She says I had it because my children had assignments that they needed the computer for and I hated it. It wasn't working It was too slow. It would freeze. I just got rid of it. I was paying ten dollars a month to not use it So families didn't see this necessarily as a way to get internet that met their needs And they ended up paying more money in order to have internet as a result made the sacrifices. They needed to do so Finally Vicki highlighted survey findings on how family members engage each other to learn about and through technology We found that in the in the interviews in very rich fashion as well Drawing on a term that one of our interviewed parents used We found that parents and kids work together as digital teams We like the term teams because it emphasizes that all players matter and that the results of any effort are shared We found that parents and kids were scaffolding each other's learning with kids often being more facile with the device itself But parents having a more sophisticated idea of what the family needed and of what content meant And so there were these fluid exchanges that were described between the expert and learner roles of parents and child children held in a way That both reinforced What skills each had but allowed them to learn from each other in these very seamless? and visible ways one of the families that's profiled in the case studies that are that are in your folder was to Resend her daughter Veronica in our Arizona study site. You can read more about their family in detail in here But what I want to point out here is that parents and kids? We interviewed routinely recognized the value of what they learned from each other when it came to technology Teresa talked about how when she can't find a website Sometimes her daughters will take the computer from her and they'll do it themselves And she has to ask them not to do that because she wants them to teach her And that's when they help her to learn how to do it instead, right? Her daughter talked about sometimes when she has homework her mom sits next to her most of the time when she's on the computer And she sometimes will ask her mom for help and it she helps me and then she learns a little bit more, too So it was that families themselves were recognizing these experiences as powerful learning experiences that led us to start focusing on them and there's a lot of Learning that we can do from these families when it comes to what they can contribute and wish to contribute to efforts to address The digital inequality and its consequences that plays a role in their lives And so the discussions that we'll have today will focus on who the partners can be For trying to address digital equity issues in ways that are relevant and responsive to the families that those programs are designed to serve I hope what we'll discuss as well is how families themselves are perhaps most important and powerful partners for the change They wish to see in their communities and in their families. I'm going to end there for now and I look forward to our conversation I just want to point out that if you go to digital equity for learning org, which is the project's website You can find digital copies of the two Reports in your folder, but also site reports for each of the three sites where we conducted interviews You can follow the Twitter's Conversation on there if you want to you know share the Event with colleagues they can join the live stream there, but we hope that this will help continue the conversation long after we leave here today Thank you very much