Can Modern Information Technologies Cross the Digital Divide To Enhance Choice and Build Stronger Schools? Occasional Paper.

The Internet is a revolution unfolding before our eyes. There is concern that this revolution will increase class and racial differences and that a new digital divide between information haves and information have-nots will exacerbate existing levels of inequality in American society. This paper examines how the Internet has been tapped to deliver information about the schools in ways that either explicitly or implicitly try to cross the digital divide. First, the paper looks at several examples of websites that are trying to cross the digital divide by presenting local information about the schools. Second, the paper looks at the problems with harnessing the Internet as a tool for doing research about the schools. Third, the paper illustrates some of these problems by analyzing patterns of usage of one of these websites to see if actual usage shows patterns of inequality or expanded usage. The final section of the paper looks at the possibility of harnessing the Internet in a way that goes beyond the consumer-choice model embodied in most current school-based sites to a much more expansive citizen-based model of improving schools and, even more ambitiously, building stronger communities. (Contains approximately 87 references. (Author)