US Children ‘Learning Online’ During COVID-19 Without the Internet or a Computer: Visualizing the Gradient by Race/Ethnicity and Parental Educational Attainment

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented disruptions to education in the United States, with a large proportion of schooling moving to online formats, which has the potential to exacerbate existing racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in learning. We visualize access to online learning technologies using data from the Household Pulse Survey from the early Fall 2020 school year (August 19-October 26). We find that 10.1% of children participating in online-learning nationally did not have adequate access to the internet and a computer. Rates of inadequate access varied nearly twentyfold across the gradient of parental race/ethnicity and education, from 1.9% for children of Asian parents with a graduate degree, to 35.5% among children of Black parents with less than a high school education. These findings indicate alarming gaps in potential learning among US children. Renewed investments in equitable access to distance-learning resources will be necessary to prevent widening racial/ethnic and class learning disparities.