Technology Alone Won't Save Poor Kids in Struggling Schools

Roughly one in four children in the United States lives in a home without a computer or Internet access, and this digital divide is often cited as a factor in the intractable achievement gap between poor students and their well-off peers. Give these kids a computer, the logic goes, and you may increase their chances of succeeding in school. Entire philanthropies are built on this idea.

But a jarring new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper concludes that all of this hardware may have no effect, at least in the short term, on educational outcomes. Matt Yglesias pointed us to the research, by University of California at Santa Cruz economists Robert W. Fairlie and Jonathan Robinson. Their randomized control trial included 1,123 sixth-through-10th grade students in 15 schools across California, making this the largest study of its kind. None of the students had computers at home at the start of the study. Half were given refurbished computers (the other half, the control group, were given computers after the study was completed so as not to unfairly taunt students for science).