For nearly twenty years, people have been worried about the digital divide: the gap between those who have access to technology and those who do not. Because of the key roles that tech plays in our lives, especially in the economic realm, it has the potential to create even deeper rifts in our society. Most of the time, discussion of the issue deals with how to get tech into the hands of socioeconomically disadvantaged.

Unfortunately, the connection between tech and success turns out to be complex. For instance, back in 2010, Jacob L. Vigdor and Helen F. Ladd published a study for the National Bureau of Economic Research entitled “Scaling the Digital Divide.” The study dug deeper into the numbers on academic lives of students, tracing the connection between success, failure, and computers in the home. They detail lots of trends, but one thing they clearly showed was that access to computers and broadband does not correlate directly with improved acheivement. Indeed, later introduction of computers into households without effective parental monitoring of child behavior can be harmful. One thing they noted—late adopters, “Students who gain access to a home computer between 5th and 8th grade tend to witness a persistent decline in reading and math test scores.”

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