homework gap poverty

Doing Educational Equity Right: The Homework Gap

Michael J. Petrilli

This is the sixth in a series on doing educational equity right. See the introductory post , as well as ones on school finance , student discipline , advanced education, and school closures .

The casual observer might be surprised that there’s much controversy about homework. A common sense, man-on-the-street view would be straightforward: Teachers should assign homework, and students should do it. After all, practice makes perfect, and kids can’t learn without exerting effort.

But alas, in this domain, as in others, there is indeed robust debate (and not just among bellyaching students). Some of it springs from “hothouse” schools in upper-middle-class suburbs where parents fret that too much homework is stressing out their sons and daughters . Some of it stems from scholars, who have questioned whether homework actually boosts learning . But much of it comes from concerns about “ the homework gap ”—the longstanding finding that kids from low-income households spend significantly less time on homework than their more advantaged peers. And therefore, some argue , we should limit homework or eliminate it altogether.

Figure 1. The high school homework gap: Average hours spent doing homework, by student poverty level, 2019

Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Parent and Family Involvement in Education Survey of the National Household Education Surveys. (This table was prepared April 2021.) Note: Poor children are those whose family incomes were below the Census Bureau’s poverty threshold in the year prior to data collection. Near-poor children are those whose family incomes ranged from the poverty threshold to 199 percent of the poverty threshold. Nonpoor children are those whose family incomes were at or above 200 percent of the poverty threshold.

You won’t be surprised that I disagree. That certainly is no way to “do educational equity right.” Instead of leveling down, Harrison Bergeron style, we should level up. Our goal when it comes to homework should be to get more students to do more of it—at least the valuable, productive kind , which loads of research studies demonstrate is related to increased academic achievement.

And that means addressing the barriers that some low-income students face when it comes to doing homework—either at home or at school.

The most obvious one relates to technology. Though the “digital divide” has largely been closed, low-income families are still less likely to have high-speed internet access in their homes. And while schools dramatically ramped up their one-to-one laptop initiatives during the pandemic, there are still locales where not all students have access to workable devices. As reported by Education Week , a recent Pew survey found that 22 percent of U.S. teens said they often or sometimes have to do their homework on a cellphone, 12 percent said that “at least sometimes” they are unable to complete homework assignments because they do not have reliable access to a computer or internet connection, and 6 percent said they have to use public Wi-Fi to do their homework “at least sometimes” because they don’t have an internet connection at home. To the extent that schools are assigning homework that must be done online, that’s an issue.

Low-income students are also less likely to report having a quiet place to do homework , not surprising given that their homes tend to be smaller and that they often are tasked with taking care of younger siblings. Their parents may also be less capable of helping with homework, given that, within lower-income families, parents and other caregivers are much more likely to have dropped out of high school themselves.

But the answer to these challenges can’t be simply to throw up our hands and say it’s unfair to assign homework to kids from low-income families, so we just won’t assign any homework to anyone. It’s to overcome the challenges!

That entails addressing the technology gaps, such as by providing laptops or Chromebooks to all students, as well as Wi-Fi hotspots . An even better approach might be to make such technology available at the school, by keeping media centers open and staffed before school, after school, and on the weekends . That turns “homework” into “out of class work”—but the benefits are the same. The marginal costs of keeping public school facilities open longer are minimal, but the benefits could be substantial.

If that creates new challenges—for example, providing transportation to students for these “extended learning time” opportunities—then study halls and the like could be built into the regular school day itself. Just make the day longer and adjust the transportation schedule accordingly. Or team up with other community organizations that could provide homework help and quiet environments, from public libraries to Boys & Girls Clubs to churches.

None of this is rocket science. Indeed, KIPP charter schools have been doing versions of this for a quarter century—including giving students their teachers’ cell-phone numbers so they can get help with homework at night . That’s because KIPP and other great high-poverty schools have always felt a sense of urgency around helping their students catch up to their more affluent peers. And they’ve always known that means working harder and longer—not just to close the homework gap, but to reverse it.

I know what some might be saying: Getting traditional public schools to do things like this is going to be hard. Chromebooks and Wi-Fi hotspots cost money. So does keeping school libraries open after school or on weekends. Not all teachers will be crazy about giving kids access to their phone numbers.

All true. But if we care about doing educational equity right, we need to call the bluff of those who want to lower expectations for students’ work and effort “because equity.” Those so-called advocates need to do some of their own homework—and penance—as well.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

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Vol. 24, No. 2

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Students and Families Need Long-Term Solutions to the Homework Gap

Covid-19 aid helps millions of students access the internet outside of school. what happens when it’s gone.

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Desiree Rios

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To increase the internet bandwidth in their apartment, Paullette Ha-Healy and her husband bought multiple Wi-Fi boosters. They upgraded their broadband package at twice the original cost.

But connectivity problems still interrupt Ha-Healy’s work as a local activist and member of the Citywide Council on Special Education in New York City. The connection frequently crashes while Ha-Healy’s children, Lucas and Kira, are logged on for school, depriving them of live instruction and disrupting their special education services.

Despite these frustrations, Ha-Healy considers her family lucky. Many families—in New York and across the country—have had to rely on temporary fixes implemented during the pandemic, such as school-issued mobile hotspots and internet subsidies, so that their children could access remote learning. 

In District 20—the southwestern Brooklyn home to a number of Title I schools, including one Ha-Healy’s daughter attends—families had to wait weeks and even months to receive loaner computers from the New York City Department of Education. 

“In Sunset Park, we have three schools that are within a five-block radius of each other, and they cumulatively had requested 300 devices,” Ha-Healy said. “They didn't get them until almost April of this year.” 

Some families were surprised that some of the devices arrived with cracked screens and chargers that didn’t work. 

The district issued one mobile hotspot per household, each of which supported three devices at a time. That meant larger families with multiple students still lacked sufficient bandwidth. “The children would have to figure out the schedule, like: OK, if this particular pre-K child had live instruction at 9 a.m., then she would sign on an the other two children would have to go without,” Ha-Healy said. 

Ha-Healy also saw older students gathering outside of fast food restaurants to access free Wi-Fi so they could complete assignments and take tests.

City education department leaders knew internet access was a larger systemic problem, Ha-Healy said, but they only provided “quick little fixes.” That was putting a Band-Aid on a complex problem, she said.

How Quick Fixes to Broadband Access Disparities Fall Short

Insufficient home broadband access is not just a New York City problem. During the pandemic, the homework gap became a full-blown crisis. Millions of students, particularly children of color and those in rural or low-income communities, couldn’t access remote learning because their families cannot access or afford basic high-speed internet.

To address that digital divide, schools across the country distributed computers and mobile hotspots to students. Schools and districts also partnered with businesses to secure computers and broadband access for students and their families. Telecommunication companies donated thousands of hotspots to schools. 

That response was never meant to be a long-term fix to inequitable broadband access. 

“Even if we get students and teachers used to using these tools and resources, when that short-term money runs out there will be permanent costs,” said Keith Krueger, CEO of the nonprofit Consortium for School Networking .

Mobile hotspots can’t support multiple users uploading content or simultaneous Zoom calls. “You also run into challenges where students max out the district-provided data plan, potentially in the middle of a school day,” said Harrison Parker, vice president of operations at  NetRef . The educational technology company produces an Internet Bandwidth Report that allows districts to access accurate measurements of their students’ average available bandwidth, which educators and administrators can use to modify classroom instruction and connect families to supports like hotspots or internet subsidies.

Some low-cost internet promotions and free trials ended with sticker shock: Families received bills for internet services that they could not afford.

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Efforts are underway to find permanent solutions to broadband access disparities rather than pandemic-era triage.

Under the Emergency Broadband Benefit program , eligible households can sign up to receive $50 a month (or $75 a month for households on tribal lands) to put toward internet service. They can also get a one-time stipend of up to $100 to buy a laptop, tablet, or desktop computer. The program, which is administered by the Federal Communications Commission as part of the $900 billion COVID relief bill passed in late December, won’t last forever. According to the program website, it is set to end “when the fund runs out of money, or six months after the Department of Health and Human Services declares an end to the COVID-19 health emergency, whichever is sooner.”

Families benefiting from the emergency broadband program would eventually have to find another option for affordable internet.

That search for affordable internet could be easier for New Yorkers, who pay on average more than $50 a month for basic high-speed internet. In April, New York became the first state to pass legislation that requires ISPs to provide affordable service options. Under that law, providers have to supply a plant that costs $15 a month, which could benefit 2.7 million low-income households in the state. Families of children who qualify for free or reduced-price, or those with a gross household income below 185% of the federal poverty guidelines in New York, are eligible for this program.

New York’s legislation goes beyond negotiating with private ISPs to offer lower-cost internet plans—services with rates that could be increased at any time. The law would also require an in-depth statewide mapping study of broadband access to determine where infrastructure is needed.

Some advocates worry that the New York mandate will not provide broadband access that is sufficient enough to support the digital needs of remote students and larger households where multiple students need to be online at the same time. 

New York’s affordable internet requirements would meet the current FCC standard, but that is “far less than what most advocates and folks in the telecom industry believe is reasonably high-speed broadband,” said Richard Berkley, the executive director of the Public Utility Law Project of New York .

Eligible families would have to upgrade to a plan that costs $20 a month to receive download speeds of at least 200 Mbps, which is what consumer advocate BroadbandNow considers good for most households where multiple users will be online and streaming content at the same time. 

Ha-Healy is also skeptical that the plans offered under the New York law will be a cure-all for families in the state. She worries that families with outstanding balances or unpaid internet bills will not be eligible for the deal, which is what happened last year with some offers of temporarily free internet services. Internet service providers Optimum and Spectrum refused to honor their offer of free 60-day service for NYC families with outstanding bills.

Advocates will have to keep an eye on whether the download speeds of internet services offered under New York’s new law are adequate for families, if the $15-a-month price is truly affordable, and whether there are any data caps, Berkley said. But the law is a step in the right direction for low-income families in New York who need broadband access but are stuck “choosing between which bills they can pay right now,” he said. “This $15-a-month option will make that part of life more affordable, and just generally possible.”

Learning From the Past to Meet Broadband Needs  

There also are efforts at the federal level for longterm ways to close the digital divide.

A top aim of President Joe Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure bill is to deliver “affordable, reliable, high-speed broadband to every American.” The bill includes a $100 billion investment to expand broadband infrastructure and reach 100% coverage, promote pricing transparency and competition, and reduce the broadband costs. This plan would move away from relying on individual subsidies (such as the Emergency Broadband Benefit) to keep prices down for consumers by potentially regulating the prices ISPs can charge. 

“While the president recognizes that individual subsidies to cover internet costs may be needed in the short term, he believes continually providing subsidies to cover the cost of overpriced internet service is not the right long-term solution for consumers or taxpayers,” a White House fact sheet states.

The proposed American Jobs Plan has been mired by staunch opposition within Congress and among cable and telecom lobby groups. Negotiations between the White House and GOP lawmakers stalled earlier this month, marking an uncertain future for the bill. 

The country faced similar challenges with electrification, Krueger of CoSN said. In the 1930s, electricity was ubiquitous in cities across the U.S., but only 10% of farms, ranches, and other rural homesteads had access to electrical power. “Private power companies were either unwilling or unable to create an energy infrastructure in sparsely populated areas at a reasonable cost,” according to The Living New Deal , a research project and online public archive. 

In 1936, Congress passed the Rural Electrification Act to provide low-cost loans to rural cooperatives. “The federal government made a commitment that regardless of where you live in the country, you're going to be able to get electricity,” Krueger said. 

By 1950, 90% of U.S. farms had electricity. 

Fast-forward to today, and the nation’s broadband access remains stratified along lines of income, ethnicity, and race, and many educators and other leaders say the consequences of maintaining this inequitable status quo loom large.

“High-speed internet has become a necessity to the point that people are saying it should be an essential utility that must be affordable for everybody.”

Margareth Legaspi, Ed.D.

Chief Education Strategy Officer, Verite Group Inc.

Changing Internet Access From a Luxury Good to a Public Utility

“We're not going to go back to what we were before in education. Digital learning is here to stay, period, and it comes in different types,” said Margareth Legaspi, Ed.D., the chief education strategy officer at  Verite Group Inc. , the parent company of NetRef. “High-speed internet has become a necessity to the point that people are saying it should be an essential utility that must be affordable for everybody.”

Addressing broadband access as an essential utility needs to happen at the federal level, some experts say.

“Once we recognize something as a vital necessity in our society, we usually try and come up with a way to bring it about for everybody,” Berkley said. “We have to offer the opportunities of the modern economy to as many Americans as possible. But we can't do that without a federal commitment because the feds are the ones that have the resources to do this.”

With the Senate still in negotiations over a bipartisan infrastructure plan , it is unclear whether a federal solution to this critical and timely issue will progress past Congress anytime soon. Meanwhile, activists including Ha-Healy continue to fight for increased internet access in their communities. 

“Because of the inequities surrounding Wi-Fi access and access to learning devices, we have thousands of children missing out on an entire year of learning,” Ha-Healy said. “The only way the internet is going to become recognized as a necessity is when more people come out and speak out.”

Ha-Healy and her fellow activists have had a busy few weeks leading up to the end of the 2021 New York legislative session, which concluded on June 10. Earlier in spring, they successfully advocated for an agreement that would bring free and low cost broadband to 13 New York City Housing Authority developments, benefiting 30,000 public housing residents .

They still are pushing state legislators to pass Senate Bill S4878B , which would direct the New York Public Service Commission to review broadband and fiber optic services within the state, and Senate Bill S3184 , which would ensure high-quality internet access for students and schools during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s tough work. But Ha-Healy said she believes the steps they take in promoting bills like these will be well worth it when they ladder up to major policy shifts on the federal level and help people across the country. 

“Once we get it into state law, then we can push it to federal law,” she said. “We’ve gone to Washington, D.C. and testified in front of Congress. We can take it to our U.S. senators and say, 'This is what you need to adapt for us at the federal level.’”

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The ‘Homework Gap’ Is About to Get Worse. What Should Schools Do?

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A program that provides discounted broadband internet service to low-income households is expected to run out of funding by the end of April, a concerning development for school districts with families that relied on the subsidy.

With the Affordable Connectivity Program , eligible families can receive a discount of up to $30 per month toward internet service. For those on qualifying tribal lands, the discount is up to $75 per month. The program also provides a one-time discount to purchase a laptop, desktop computer, or tablet from participating providers.

Nearly 23 million households have enrolled in the program since it launched in 2021, according to the Federal Communications Commission, which runs the program. However, the agency stopped accepting new enrollments as of Feb. 8 and said it will disenroll all households from the program at the end of April, unless Congress provides additional funding.

Schools are increasingly relying on technology for teaching and learning, from learning management systems to multimedia curriculum to internet research. In some cases, schools are turning inclement weather days into remote learning days . So it’s even more imperative that students have sufficient internet connectivity and devices to access learning materials while at home.

‘It’s a huge equity problem’

Educators and advocates say the possible sunsetting of the Affordable Connectivity Program could worsen the so-called “ homework gap ”—a phrase used to describe the inequities between students who have digital devices and reliable internet connectivity at home, and those who don’t and struggle to complete online assignments as a result.

“My fear is that, with this funding running out, we’re going to have either more families not having access to those services, or more families having to go someplace with open Wi-Fi that maybe isn’t as secure as it should be,” said Chantell Manahan, the director of technology for Steuben County schools, a 2,600-student district in rural northeast Indiana. The program’s expiration could also mean more “families away from home, sitting in parking lots like they were during the pandemic, and that’s not a good place for our students and families to be.”

In 2024, [internet access is] not a luxury anymore. This is a necessity to participate in modern society.

The expiration of the Affordable Connectivity Program doesn’t just affect students, but parents, too.

“Many schools rely on online communications platforms to communicate with parents and guardians about their student’s progress, school activities, and other important information. If families lose affordable internet access, this [communication] channel may be compromised,” said Julia Fallon, the executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association.

Sometimes, a school-issued device is the only one available to use at home, so parents also use it to look for jobs, do online coursework, or attend telehealth appointments, Manahan said.

“It’s not just a K-12 education problem. It’s a community problem. It’s a huge equity problem,” she added.

Will Congress provide more funding for ACP?

The Affordable Connectivity Program first launched as the Emergency Broadband Benefit, which was part of a pandemic relief package signed by former President Donald Trump in 2020. The next year, the program was codified as part of the bipartisan infrastructure law signed by President Joe Biden.

But the program has run through much of the initial $17.4 billion allocated by Congress, including $14.2 billion from the infrastructure law and $3.2 billion from its emergency predecessor.

In January, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced a bill in the Senate and the House of Representatives that would provide $7 billion to keep the Affordable Connectivity Program operational.

It’s unclear how much traction the bill will receive, but several FCC commissioners and advocacy groups have applauded the bill and urged Congress to pass the measure.

Districts look for other solutions

In the meantime, district leaders are having tough conversations about how to provide adequate internet access to students and families who relied on the program.

In Steuben County, Manahan said the district might go back to solutions it used before the Affordable Connectivity Program, such as partnerships with local businesses and organizations that would let families come in and use their Wi-Fi for virtual learning.

The district has Wi-Fi hotspot devices it can lend to students, too, though Manahan is unsure how many of those devices the district can keep after funding runs out. The devices were originally funded through ESSER and the Emergency Connectivity Fund , both of which are also expiring this year.

Fortunately, Manahan said, the FCC’s E-rate funding will now cover putting Wi-Fi on school buses .

“It’ll be much more cost-effective for the district to be able to outfit all the buses,” she said. “We know there are some places where we might be able to park those buses and have internet access available.”

Along with school bus Wi-Fi, the district could also extend the reach of the Wi-Fi on school buildings so students, families, and staff can use it in the parking lot, she said.

“I can only hope that if we do see both ACP and ECF sunsetting that they’re going to divert those funds to other programs [that would provide] internet access into all our homes,” Manahan said. “In 2024, it’s not a luxury anymore. This is a necessity to participate in modern society.”

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COVID-19 is Widening the Homework Gap. Education Equity Groups See an Opportunity to Close It.

Spend part of your week learning from home without the early morning scramble to get dressed, out the door, onto the bus or into the car, and through the school doors? A combination of blended online and in-person might sound like a dream to some students and parents, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. But for those who are low-income, the online portion is out of reach, and it threatens to exacerbate an already existing homework gap.

A new study conducted in partnership with Alliance for Excellent Education  (All4Ed), the  National Indian Education Association (NIEA), the  National Urban League , and  UnidosUS — shows that nearly 17 million students across the country lack the high-speed internet access they need to adequately connect to the virtual classroom. The report comes with a call to action for Congress to pass the  Emergency Education Connections Act , a bill aimed at closing that connectivity gap, and to include in its next coronavirus relief package some $6.8 billion for E-rate, a program of the Federal Communications Commission that provides discounts for telecommunications, internet access, and internal connections to eligible schools and libraries.

Drawing from data collected in the 2018 American Community Survey for households with children age 18 or younger, the study, titled “Students of Color Caught in the Homework Gap,” shows that 16.9 million of the children in 8.4 million households lack a subscription to any kind of internet access. This is the case for 44.5% of households with an annual income of $25,000, and of those, nearly 29% lack access to a computer, a tool which has proven far more useful than smartphones for online classroom engagement.

While poverty cuts across all ethnic groups, a disproportionate number of low-income families are AmericanIndian/Alaska Native, Black, or Latino and/or rural. About 36% of rural households lack access and 14% of them have no computer. As an ethnic group, Native families see the largest gap in access. An estimated 34% of Native families have no internet access and 16% have no computer. The numbers are only slightly better for Black and Latino families. In both cases, 31% lack internet access and 17% lack a computer. For White families, that number is much lower, with just 21% lacking an at-home connection and only 8% without a computer.

“We cannot continue to overlook the disproportionate impact of this divide, especially as the new school year approaches and with the likelihood that virtual learning will continue in some form,” UnidosUS President and CEO Janet Murguía said in a joint press release for the study. “The success of students who lack essential tools for virtual learning depends on robust federal funding to close the digital divide.”

Her statement was echoed by executive leadership of the partnering organizations, all of whom insisted that the federal government heed their calls for funding and policy change.

“Asking students—many of whom are from low-income or rural homes—to try to learn with a family member’s cell phone or with paper packets is neither acceptable nor sustainable,” notes All4Ed President and CEO Deborah Delisle. “What we offer to our students tells them what it is we value. This is our time to show we care.”

“For far too long, limited broadband access in Native communities has hampered efforts to provide effective culture-based virtual education options for Native students,” says Diana Cournoyer, executive director of NIEA. “It is the duty of the federal government to uphold its treaty and trust responsibilities, including those for equity and sovereignty in education, to Native nations.”

National Urban League President and CEO Marc Morial said his organization supported these concerns and was pleased to be part of an educational partnership aimed at “ensuring that those in leadership understand the full extent of these racial disparities and invest in students, schools, and communities with the greatest needs.”

Some members of the federal government are already showing their support for this study.

“The statistics are sobering,” notes U.S. Representative Grace Meng (D-NY), who commended the partnering organizations for pulling together and publishing the report in the midst of an unprecedented health crisis, and introduced the  Emergency Education Connections Act  in the House of Representatives.

“As this important report highlights, nearly 17 million students lack the broadband connectivity they need to continue their education online during this crisis, with the children of low-income families, rural areas, and communities of color at a disproportionate risk of being left behind,” affirms U.S. Senator Edward J. Markey (D-MA), who sponsored the  Emergency Education Connections Act  in the Senate. He said he was committed to asking Congress to allocate at least $4 billion through the E-Rate program in order to avoid an even bigger gap.

The Federal Communications Commission also expressed its support.

“The homework gap is the cruelest part of the digital divide,” notes FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel. “This should be a clarion call for policymakers at all levels that bold action is required. It’s time to rise to this challenge because no student should be left offline.”

To learn more about the homework gap, including an interactive map with state-by-state data, visit this all4ed page .

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• Home Internet

The digital divide has left millions of school kids behind

US schools are going back to in-person learning as COVID ebbs, but the so-called homework gap will persist.

The coronavirus shined a light on the homework gap, or the disparity between the haves and have-nots when it comes to those students with laptops, tablets and high-speed internet and those without even basic online access. But the waning of the pandemic's threat is a stark reminder that this aspect of the larger digital divide was a problem long before, and will remain one even as things return to normal. 

But the seismic shift sparked by the coronavirus has some optimistic that more change is on the way. 

When schools across the country shut down in March 2020 , more than 50 million students across the nation were forced to access their education remotely. This sent districts scrambling to replace their in-person instruction with some form of online learning. Some schools offered live video streams, while others posted assignments online and expected students to access content and assignments.

Locating local internet providers

More than a year later, with vaccines more readily available, schools are starting to reopen more fully. But the digital divide and the homework gap haven't gone away, even with new attention and funding directed toward emergency relief. The CARES Act, passed by Congress at the outset of the crisis, gave an initial boost that helped many schools purchase devices for students who didn't have them and pay for broadband service.

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An additional $50 billion was allocated for K-12 education in the COVID emergency relief funding passed in December. The funds, which are reaching districts now, can be used for a range of pandemic-related services, including distance learning. More money to close the digital divide is expected as part of President Joe Biden's $2 trillion infrastructure plan. 

Now, as educators and policy makers prepare for what's next, people are taking a hard look at where things stand and what lessons have been learned from this year.  

"The most exciting thing we learned about the homework gap during the pandemic is that schools are uniquely positioned to help close this divide for their students," said Amina Fazlullah, director of equity policy for Common Sense, a nonprofit focused on education. "Pre-pandemic, we relied on a patchwork of solutions from low-income programs or benevolent service providers, grand programs from the federal and state government. But most of these programs were developed with no coordination with the schools."

Fazlullah said that's changing as schools see the real tangible effects of the digital divide. Common Sense partnered with the Boston Consulting Group, EducationSuperHighway and Southern Education Foundation, to publish three in-depth reports over the past year looking at the magnitude of the divide and potential solutions.

Nicol Turner Lee, director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution , has studied the digital divide for more than two decades. She agrees that the pandemic has given schools, as well as policy makers, an opportunity to jump-start efforts to bring digital equity to education. But she cautions that, as students return to the classroom, school leaders shouldn't abandon their efforts to improve digital equity for their students. 

"Schools are now rushing to get their students back into schools, because in many ways they think this will solve the digital access issues they have and the loss of learning some students have experienced," she said. "But what I fear is we're missing the opportunity to get our kids ready for a new digitally connected economy."

She said the past year has been a how-to-solve-the-digital divide pilot of sorts, with school districts, state governments and others trying out various solutions. Now schools are in a precarious moment in the crisis, and she is urging school leaders and policymakers in Washington to not let this moment pass them by in terms of making sure no student is left offline.

To help readers make sense of all this, we've put together this FAQ to give you a better sense of what the homework gap is, why it exists and how it can be solved. 

What is the homework gap? 

The homework gap is a term that's been used to describe the millions of children in grades K-12 for whom access to broadband services at home or access to suitable devices are unavailable, leaving them unable to access homework and other educational resources. 

One thing the pandemic has made clear is that the so-called homework gap is worse than we had thought. Pre-pandemic estimates put the number of unconnected students in grades K-12 at 12 million. A June 2020 study by Common Sense, EducationSuperHighway and Boston Consulting Group suggests that between 15 million and 16 million students, or 30% of all public school students, live in households without either an internet connection or a device adequate for distance learning, or both. 

Who is most affected by the homework gap?

Every state in the US has pockets of unconnected students in all types of communities, according to the Common Sense and Boston Consulting Group report. But it's most significant among rural households, particularly in southern states, such as Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Mississippi. It also disproportionately affects students in lower-income families. Roughly 50% of unconnected students come from families with annual incomes less than $50,000.

How did the pandemic worsen the gap?

When schools shut down, the coronavirus pandemic brought to the forefront the digital inequities within communities. But it also made the homework gap a more serious problem for students who lacked access. No longer was this lack of access to the internet or a suitable computing device just about not being able to get homework completed. Instead, students without a device or broadband access were cut off from their education almost entirely. 

"It was a homework gap pre-COVID," said Gaby Rowe, the project lead for Texas' Operation Connectivity , which used federal CARES Act money to coordinate the bulk purchase of 1 million computing devices and 500,000 hotspots for students throughout Texas during the pandemic. "But now it's morphed into a much larger and more devastating learning gap post-COVID." 

Because the digital divide disproportionately affects students from lower-income families and students of color, a failure to address the digital divide will likely lead to a widening gap in student achievement, a problem that also existed long before the pandemic. Now the digital divide threatens to widen that gap, further marginalizing students who were already at risk of falling behind. 

Why are people still unconnected?

The overwhelming reason why students lack access to remote online learning is the cost and affordability of services and devices, according to the Common Sense Boston Consulting Group study . That report found that up to 60% of disconnected K-12 students, or about 9 million students, especially Black and urban students, can't afford digital access. 

Up to 40% of disconnected students, or about 6 million students, face adoption barriers, such as a lack of digital literacy skills or the ability to get through the signup process for low-cost services. This group also included families that had language barriers in accessing service or that distrusted the internet because of privacy concerns.  

Roughly a quarter of students, or about 4 million, lack access to reliable broadband infrastructure. This reason mostly affected students living in rural regions, and it disproportionately affects Native American students. 

Why does it matter?

Solving the homework gap or digital divide issue for schoolchildren is important for several reasons. For one, it's essential that all students have equal access to distance learning because it ensures workforce development and readiness for the next generation of Americans. 

Also, research has long demonstrated that access to quality education can help break the cycles of poverty. There are early indications that students who have been unable to access distance learning over this past year are falling behind. 

Last, ensuring that households with K-12 students have access to broadband and affordable devices can go a long way in terms of solving the broader digital divide, providing greater access to employment opportunities, job training and remote health care for all Americans. 

Because the digital divide affects a third of students in the US, the consequences of not addressing the issue could be dire, experts say. Even though the vaccine rollout has improved in the US, the global pandemic is still far from over with variants of the virus still circulating around many parts of the world. Many communities in the US remain vulnerable to the virus, meaning schools could continue an on-again, off-again return to distance learning for the foreseeable future. Not dealing with the problem now will only exacerbate inequities in schools and throughout society that existed prior to the pandemic.

What's being done to solve it?

Last March, Congress allocated $1.5 billion in federal CARES Act funding to help schools close these gaps as they pivoted to virtual learning amid school closures. Several states also put CARES Act money to help address the digital divide and homework gap for schools. 

These efforts closed 20% to 40% of the K-12 connectivity divide and 40% to 60% of the device divide as of December 2020, according to the Common Sense and Boston Consulting report. But 12 million school-age students still remained disconnected going into 2021. This was due to a slew of issues, including poor broadband data, infrastructure and supply chain issues, and lackluster adoption of existing programs as well as inadequate funding to continue to address the issues. 

In December, federal lawmakers approved additional COVID-19 relief funding for schools , including $50 billion that can be used for pandemic-related expenses including distance learning. But analysts say more than 75% of the existing efforts aimed at closing the digital divide for schools will expire within three years. This means that there's no long-term solution in place to ensure digital equity in the future. 

Some are hoping that Biden's infrastructure plan can help address some of these issues more broadly. He is calling for spending $100 billion to expand broadband in rural communities where access doesn't yet exist and to help make broadband more affordable across the country. Though the proposed spending makes up only a tiny fraction of the overall $2 trillion in spending that Biden wants to see Congress allocate for his infrastructure plan, the policy and political ambitions around the issue are huge.

Still, Common Sense's Fazlullah is optimistic that with support in Congress and among policy makers in Washington, progress can continue. 

"With policy changes and a commitment to providing necessary funding, we can close these gaps for good," she said. 

What still needs to be done?

Fazlullah says that more state and federal funding is necessary. The Common Sense and Boston Consulting Group report estimates that closing the digital divide will require between $6 billion and $11 billion in the first year and between $4 billion and $8 billion annually thereafter, to address affordability and adoption gaps. This doesn't include the cost of deploying new infrastructure, which some have estimated at $80 billion or more. 

In addition, the report recommends funding be targeted to achieve efficient use of funds. This includes adopting policies to enable bulk purchasing of devices and internet service with transparent, affordable pricing and digital inclusion support. Public policy should also encourage technology-agnostic investment and encourage broadband networks to be built  where it doesn't currently exist or where it's insufficient to meet student needs. 

Success will also require strong partnerships between the public and private sector to assess students' needs and to address issues. 

Turner Lee said that Congress also needs to make statutory changes to existing programs to ensure they have enough flexibility to direct federal dollars where they are most needed. For instance, she suggests expanding the federal E-rate program to help ensure broadband access in public housing and other public areas, like parks. 

"There are statutory restrictions that define where money for our existing programs can go," she said. 

She told members of the Trade subcommittee of the House of Representatives Ways and Means committee last week during a hearing that what is needed is America's Tech New Deal, a program that she said "would deepen investments already made by the private sector in high-speed broadband networks and also provide new models to use that infrastructure to create jobs, expand small businesses and reimagine delivery of services, including remote education, work and health care."

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There was a huge online learning divide between high-poverty and low-poverty school districts this spring

• A new survey from the American Institutes of Research on how schools are responding to the coronavirus pandemic released preliminary responses from 474 school districts.
• Almost a third of high-poverty districts reported that teachers mostly reviewed content covered earlier in the year to students from kindergarten to fifth grade. For older students grades six through 12, roughly one-quarter focused on reviewing concepts.
• Meanwhile, in low-poverty districts, only 8% reported that teachers emphasized review from kindergarten to fifth grade. For older students grades six through 12, only 6% focused on reviewing concepts.
• Most school districts spent less time on instruction overall. Virtual school amounted to an average of 3.87 hours per day with high schoolers. Many states require at least six hours.
• Students in high-poverty districts were also more likely to learn from physically distributed materials, like paper packets. In low-poverty districts, 9% of students grades six through 12 learned from physical materials, compared to 42% of students in high-poverty districts.
• The "homework gap" has become one concerning factor in the shift to remote learning: one analysis found that 16.9 million children did not have the home internet access needed for online schooling.
• And this homework gap disproportionately impacts students of color; that same analysis found that 8% of white families do not have a computer at home — compared to 17% of Black and Latino families.
• Additionally, the Pew Research Center reports  that a quarter of low-income teens do not have access to a computer at home.
• The low-poverty districts surveyed were also more likely to monitor students signing or logging into online programs. In fact, only 1% of low-poverty districts did not monitor student participation at all, compared to 15% of high-poverty districts.
• Responses from school leaders included concerns over equity, with one respondent writing: "Big challenges remain in the implementation of appropriate services for underserved student groups — students with disabilities, EL students, and economically disadvantaged students in our district."
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories .

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The ‘Homework Gap’ and Academic Achievement in High School Science: An Ecological Perspective for Policymakers and Practitioners

National Youth Advocacy and Resilience Journal

Related Papers

First Monday

Melissa Santillana

The homework gap is a term that has come to describe the 15 percent or more of American children who cannot complete their homework after the school day ends because they lack access to broadband and computers (Anderson and Perrin, 2018). This statistic encompasses different economic, socio-cultural, and geographic factors. As a result, historically underprivileged groups of children are overrepresented in the homework gap space. Children without access to high-speed Internet or computers at home face challenges in school achievement. This study investigates the cultural, social, and technological aspects that contribute to the homework gap. The results are based on data from a survey conducted in collaboration with the city of Austin, Texas and several non-profit organizations that offer Internet and technology services to disadvantaged communities. The goal of this study is to investigate the role that demographics, technological skills, and attitudes toward technology play in the...

Erhan Delen

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of information and communication technologies (ICT) on students’ math and science achievement. Recently, ICT has been widely used in classrooms for teaching and learning purposes. Therefore, it is important to investigate how these technological developments affect students’ performance at school. The data for this study comes from the 2009 administration of The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), an internationally standardized assessment administered to15-year-old students (9th grades) in schools. The sample includes 4996 students in Turkey. Hierarchical linear modeling was used for analyzing the effects of ICT in student and school levels by using ICT-related variables such as technology scores and ICT availability at home, etc. The results indicated that students’ familiarity with ICT and their exposure to technology helped to explain math and science achievement gaps between individuals and schools. ICT is an important factor that should be taken into consideration when designing classroom environments.

Online Submission

Susan Metros

Elena Papanastasiou

Educational Research and Evaluation

michalinos zembylas

The purpose of this study was to compare the relationships that exist between computer use and science achievement for 15-year-old students in the USA and Germany, based on data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). The results of this study show that what has an effect on science achievement is the way in which computers are used. The results indicated that students who used computers frequently at home, including for writing papers, tended to have higher science achievement. Students who had frequent availability of computers at school, who used them at that location, and who frequently used computers for programming had lower levels of science achievement.

Andres Camacho-Murillo

This study analyzes the academic performance of students from an official school in Bogotá (Colombia) who had asymmetric access to Information and Communication Technologies during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Classical Linear Regression Model is employed using data from a survey of a representative group of students in the year 2020. Results show technological gaps between students that are associated with asymmetric academic performance against students with limited or null access to the Internet and electronic devices. Results also show that, among students with permanent access to the Internet, women have better scores compared to men’s scores, which implies that women can achieve better academic results than men in virtual education. It is also noted that the sole access to an electronic device does not guarantee good academic achievements if there is no full access to the Internet, and if ICT-use skills have not been developed.

Large-scale Assessments in Education

Mehmet Karakus

This study analyzed the latest four PISA surveys, 2009, 2012, 2015, and 2018, to explore the association between students’ ICT-related use and math and science performance. Using ICT Engagement Theory as a theoretical framework and a three-level hierarchical linear modeling approach, while controlling for confounding effects, ICT-related independent variables of interest were added to the models at the student, school, and country levels. The series of models revealed that, in general, an increase in ICT availability and ICT use both inside and outside school had a negative association with learning outcomes, while students’ positive attitude toward ICT demonstrated a strong positive relationship. However, students’ perceived autonomy related to ICT use had the strongest association with academic performance, which is consistent with the changing nature of modern learning environments. Findings revealed that virtually all forms of student ICT use, both inside and outside of school and whether subject related or not, had no substantive positive relationship with student performance in math or science. Conversely, higher student attitude toward, confidence in, belief in the utility of, and autonomous use of ICT was associated with higher math and science performance for each of the four years of the study. Incidentally, we also found that while country GDP per capita had no consistent association with student performance, a school’s provision of extra-curricula activities did. Recommendations for educational leaders, teachers, and parents are offered.

EURASIA Journal of Mathematics, Science and Technology Education

Bryce Odell

Journal of Science Education and Technology

Binbin Zheng

Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research

Beatriz Peña Acuña

In the last two decades, the great technological advances sweeping society have made inroads into the educational sphere. The use of information and communication technology and social networks has opened up new possibilities for student learning, which require appropriate treatment by family and teachers. This quantitative study takes a new approach to investigating the relationship between Spanish teenage students' academic success and their use of technology and social networks. It analyses data published in the 2018 PISA report to assess whether the use of these resources is appropriate, and to determine their impact on students' learning and performance in reading, mathematics and science. The study takes a new approach in terms of the variables selected and the analysis of the data through two statistical measures. The results suggest that excessive use of technology and social networks, both during the week and at weekends, impairs performance. This finding is more acute in the case of male students, as the data indicates that they start at an earlier age and are more likely to use social media for the detrimental activity of online gaming.Estudio cuantitativo correlacional de variables en el informe Pisa 2018 acerca del uso de TIC y rendimiento académico en adolescentes. How to cite this article (APA): Navarro-Martinez,O. & Peña-Acuña, B.(2022).Technology Usage and Academic Performance in the Pisa 2018 Report.Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research,11(1),130-145.doi:10.7821/naer.2022.1.735 Quality: Citation Impact 0.81 (Q1) - SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), 5.2 (Q1) - Scopus CitesCore, 2.50 (Q1) - WOS JCR-JCI

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Low Socioeconomic Status Could Be Disadvantageous When Completing Homework  

"As a result of students coming from different backgrounds, homework can further exacerbate existing inequalities and create new ones."

By Andrea Sequeira

April 14, 2024

DR. LEE ANN JUNG VIA TWITTER

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Having a low socioeconomic status as a student could be a major disadvantage when completing, with many factors coming into play, such as limited Internet access, little parental involvement, etc.

But before getting into that discussion, it is important to understand the background information behind, what some might consider, a controversy.

In a Tweet posted by @leeannjung , a clinical professor at San Diego State University, wrote, “Homework serves no purpose other than to widen the gap for… students living in poverty.” The homework gap is essentially the challenges students from low-income households face when trying to complete their homework. The reason this sparks up debate is because some suggest that coming from a low-socioeconomic background shouldn’t affect the completion of homework and it shouldn’t widen the achievement gap between those with higher incomes than compared to those with lower.

Now that we have a basic understanding of what the basis of that claim was founded on, let’s now delve into the reasons as to why having a low socioeconomic status can cause an array of problems for the students facing this situation.

One of the biggest factors is limited technological and Internet access, better known as the digital divide. It is unfortunate, but it is a reality, not every student has the ability to afford laptops or computers to complete their homework. The digital divide only further widened the homework gap. The National Center for Education Statistics reported that in 2019, “12 percent of students… below the poverty threshold did not have access to the Internet at home.” To put it into perspective, we are in the 21 st century, an advanced age of technology, and with changes implanted by schools that occurred due to COVID-19, everything is online, and homework is no exception. This is especially a problem for minorities, for example, Lauraine Genota, an Education Week Staff writer, discusses the results of a survey provided by ACT’s Center for Equity in Learning, in which they found 26% of American Indians only had one device at home.

MR. TRAYVON VIA TIKTOK

Aside from limited access to resources, such as devices and the Internet to complete homework, another factor associated with low socioeconomic background is little parental involvement. At home, students don’t have a teacher who can help them with their homework. Students, especially those of a younger age, often rely on their parents to guide them. Unfortunately, when looking at these low-income households, as @mr.trayvon discusses in a TikTok post , not every student has that luxury because oftentimes these parents have 2 or more jobs trying to make ends meet. As a result, these parents are not at home the majority of the time to help their children with their homework if they are struggling with it. Although some people might make the argument, that these parents can just hire a tutor so that way they can have some sort of involvement, it is important to be mindful that not many parents can afford that expense.

Not only is this a problem occurring at home, but it can also find its way back into the classroom because teachers can add on to this dilemma. Dr. William Jeynes, a Professor of Education at California State University Long Beach, found what he calls a self-fulfilling prophecy in these types of scenarios: teachers believe that parents with impoverished backgrounds will not help with their child’s education or homework, therefore, parents who fall under this category are no encouraged to become more involved by teachers. In fact, a study done by Kathryn V. Drummond, director of REL Northwest, and Deborah Stipek, former dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Education, found that these disadvantaged parents felt that they should be highly involved in their children’s learning. When teachers and educators have these assumptions, as Dr. Jeynes suggests, it can be detrimental to the student because these parents do want to be involved, even though they struggle to, and now on top of that they are being discouraged from doing so.

It truly is one long, giant rabbit hole of complications and challenges, as Gabriela Ramirez Herrera, a student from California State University, puts it , “As a result of students coming from different backgrounds, homework can further exacerbate existing inequalities and create new ones.” Not every student has a parent who can help them at home, a quiet environment, or enough time. It causes stress to both the student and their parents. Because low socioeconomic status doesn’t allow students to complete their homework, the stress causes them to lower their self-esteem, making the desire to complete homework lower. It is a continuing cycle that can cause a student to reach a point of learned helplessness.

Thankfully there are solutions that teachers can implement that can allow these disadvantaged to complete their homework and lessen the achievement gap.

One thing that can be done as suggested by Starr Sackstein , a secondary educator, is allowing students to have a choice on how or when the assignment should be completed. At the end of the day disadvantaged students know the situation they are in more than anyone else and giving them the chance to have a voice and contribute can be beneficial to their education especially since they will be getting the benefits that homework provides.

Another approach provided by Cengage Group , a global education technology company, is suggesting homework that isn’t as time-consuming because many of these students might have jobs to provide for their families that take up their time to complete homework. They call it a “flipped classroom” in which a teacher can provide the student with a video or text that prepares them for the lecture the next day and gives the student a chance to ask questions if they don’t understand.

And then of course it is always important to be mindful of that digital divide that was brought up in previous paragraphs. Try making sure that the homework being given online can also be printed on paper for the students who don’t have access to the internet.

It goes without saying that many students are at a disadvantage when it comes to homework due to certain situational factors that are often out of their control. Hopefully, once there is a greater understanding of this problem, comes a greater urge to fix this homework gap that students face.

One Way America Can Meaningfully Address Poverty

A white family in Atlanta, Georgia today has 46 times as much wealth as a Black family; a racial wealth gap that is exactly the same as it was nationally in 1863 when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation ending the era of legalized enslavement. Over forty years of neoliberal economic policy have profoundly exacerbated income and wealth inequality especially across racial lines. The crisis of the immoral racial wealth gap will remain until we deploy evidence-based policies that address both historical and contemporary barriers to wealth generation.

Increasing people’s income through higher wages and guaranteed income is critical, but income is only one facet of wealth and it’s not enough to start to close the wealth gap by itself. Unlike income, which generally speaking comes as a paycheck, wealth takes many forms. The nature of compounding interest has always meant that a great way to make money in America is to have money; to graduate college debt-free and start a job with a 401-K, to have your parents float you a down payment on your first house, or to inherit “startup capital” from a beloved auntie to start your dream business. If we are serious about closing the racial wealth gap, our financial and political strategies must stabilize income and generate wealth.

Read More: Ronald Reagan’s Policies Continue to Exacerbate the Racial Wealth Gap

Poverty is not inevitable, but it is entrenched. To meaningfully address American poverty requires strategies that address the full financial picture of providing steady, stable income, and generating meaningful wealth building. Americans who are struggling to make ends meet today need steady cash flow through guaranteed income programs and wealth-building interventions like baby bonds.

A “baby bond,” or guaranteed inheritance, is a public fund paid out as a lump sum when the recipient reaches a certain age. Children shouldn't be limited in achieving their economic potential because of the family they are born into or the zip code where they live. Baby bonds are already part of the state programming in California and Connecticut and are under consideration in six other states. Connecticut’s newly launched baby bond program automatically invests $3,200 for any child that qualifies for Medicaid, allowing a young adult to claim those funds to purchase a home, save for their retirement, invest in a business, or pay for tuition or job training. And there are pending bills in Massachusetts, Vermont, and Rhode Island to do the same.  On the federal level, Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) made baby bonds a cornerstone of his presidential campaign in 2021 and with U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) introduced the American Opportunity Accounts Act, which would create savings accounts for every child for $1,000 at birth, dramatically changing the trajectory of a child's life.

Now, new research on cash transfers reinforces the existing evidence on guaranteed income and provides further backing for the power of significant, lump-sum payments like baby bonds as a critical strategy for addressing entrenched generational poverty. Here in the U.S. we already have over 300 studies and 150 pilot programs across the country that prove just how powerful guaranteed income is as a tool for economic stability with outsized impacts on improving mental health, employment, and a sense of self- determination . Unsurprisingly, the new Kenyan-based research found that lump sum and longer-term monthly payments are each more effective than short-term financial support. The case for sustained, consistent, and scaled investment could not be clearer.

Poverty is a generational problem and it’s one that we can and should solve, but to do so will require holistic and generational approaches that fully take into account how wealth-building works. We need a multi-pronged approach that incorporates cash transfers, guaranteed income and baby bonds, all working in tandem to address unique components of generational poverty. Pairing these programs provides stability and mobility, accomplishing more together than either approach can provide on their own.

Building off this evidence-based model, there is work afoot in Atlanta right now to bring together guaranteed income and baby bond programs under the GRO Fund’s Seed Capital for Life which would provide hundreds of young people in Georgia a “baby bond” payout of $40,000 plus a guaranteed income of $500 a month. Programs like this build economic security and close the racial wealth gap in a way that addresses structural racism head on. Given that in just the last few years, the five richest men have doubled their fortunes while 5 billion people have gotten poorer worldwide, we need more policymakers to follow the example of Georgia, Connecticut, and California, and invest in people and communities. These policies point to a broader opportunity to build our next economic framework that guarantees what Americans need not just to survive, but thrive. With the data in hand on the effectiveness of these “both and” strategies for closing the racial wealth gap, what are we waiting for? Another 161 years to go by?

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• Wealth Surged in the Pandemic, but Debt Endures for Poorer Black and Hispanic Families

1. Wealth gaps within racial and ethnic groups

Table of contents.

• The range of wealth within racial and ethnic groups
• The share of racial or ethnic groups’ wealth held by richer households, not counting the top 1%
• Households with no wealth or in debt
• How wealth varies by race and ethnicity
• The wealth of White households relative to the wealth of other households
• Households in the lower, middle or upper tiers of wealth
• The wealth of U.S. households by income tier
• Racial and ethnic wealth gaps by income tier
• Types of assets owned by U.S. households
• The value of assets owned by households
• The importance of home equity
• The debt level of households
• How high is household debt?
• Acknowledgments
• Data source
• Race and ethnicity
• Household head
• Adjusting for inflation
• Defining income tiers
• Statistical testing

Household wealth or net worth is the value of assets owned by every member of the household minus their debt. The terms are used interchangeably in this report. Assets include owned homes, vehicles, financial accounts, retirement accounts, stocks, bonds and mutual funds, and more. Debt refers to home mortgage loans, education loans, credit card balances, and any other loan or credit extended to the household. Net worth is negative when debt levels are greater than asset values. ( Refer to the methodology for more details.)

“Poorer,” “more solvent,” “wealthier” and “richer” refer to a household’s wealth status relative to other households of the same race and ethnicity . Poorer households rank in the bottom 25% when compared with other households of the same race and ethnicity; more solvent households place from the 25th up to and including the 50th percentile; wealthier households from the 50th up to and including the 75th percentile; and the richer are in the top 25%. The bottom 1% and the top 1% are excluded prior to the ranking so extreme values do not affect estimates for poorer and richer households.

Lower, middle and upper wealth tiers refer to a household’s wealth status relative to all other households in the U.S. The middle wealth tier consists of households whose wealth lies between one-quarter to four times as much as the median wealth of U.S. households – between $41,700 and $667,500 in 2021. Households in the lower wealth tier had wealth less than $41,700, and households in the upper wealth tier had wealth more than $667,500. The wealth tier boundaries vary across years. (Dollar amounts are expressed in December 2021 prices.)

Middle-income households are those with an income that is two-thirds to double that of the U.S. median household income, after incomes have been adjusted for household size and difference in the cost of living across areas. This was about $4,800 to $14,300 monthly in December 2021, for a household of three. Lower-income households had incomes less than $4,800, and upper-income households had incomes greater than $14,300. The income tier boundaries vary across years. (Dollar amounts are expressed in December 2021 prices.)

Households are grouped by the race and ethnicity of the survey reference person, or the household head. White, Black and Asian include those who report being only one race and are not Hispanic. Multiracial includes non-Hispanics of two or more races. Hispanics are of any race. American Indian or Pacific Islander households are not covered in our analysis because of small sample sizes.

In this chapter, we focus on the differences in wealth between richer and poorer members of each racial and ethnic group we studied. Our key findings are:

• The disparity in wealth between richer and more solvent households is most pronounced among Black Americans and Hispanics.
• The richer 25% of households in each group hold 75% or more of wealth within that group – not counting the top 1%, who alone hold a large share.
• Wealth disparities on both counts largely edged down during the pandemic.

The wealth divide across poorer and richer households in the United States varies from one racial and ethnic group to another.

Although poorer Black households saw an improvement in their finances from 2019 to 2021, they were likely to be in debt in both years. Their debt level, beyond what they held in assets, stood at $10,100 in 2019 and $4,000 in 2021 at the median.

More solvent Black households had a modest median net worth of $6,700 in 2021, but this was more than double their wealth in 2019. Wealthier and richer Black households had $79,700 and $414,200 in 2021, respectively, and both groups saw gains over the pandemic.

Poorer Hispanic households were neither solvent nor in debt in 2021, when their median net worth stood at zero. Hispanic households that were more solvent had a net worth of $18,600 in 2021, wealthier Hispanic households had $122,800, and richer Hispanic households held $528,100. From 2019 to 2021, the net worth of more solvent Hispanic households increased by 74%, greater than the increase for wealthier Hispanic households (29%).

Poorer Asian households had a modest amount of wealth in 2021 – $8,900 – but it was three times what they had in 2019. It was also notably more than the net worth of poorer Black and Hispanic households. The wealth of Asian households also rises steeply up the wealth ladder, with more solvent Asian households having $149,900 and the richer holding $1.8 million in 2021 at the median.

The percentage increase in wealth from 2019 to 2021 was greater among less rich Asian households: 84% for the more solvent, 33% for the wealthier and 23% for richer households.

Wealth holding among White households largely mirrors the pattern among Asian households. Poorer White households were a step above insolvency in 2021, with a median net worth of $4,700, compared with $800 in 2019. More solvent White households typically had $128,400 in 2021, and richer White households were mostly millionaires, with a median net worth of $1.5 million.

In percentage terms, the increase for more solvent White households (30%) was greater than the increase for wealthier (18%) and richer (13%) White households.

One way to measure wealth inequality within a group is to take the ratio of the wealth of richer households in that group to the wealth of more solvent households. By this measure, wealth inequality within all racial and ethnic groups examined narrowed from 2019 to 2021. (We do not measure the ratio of the net worth of richer to poorer households because poorer Black and Hispanic households have either negative or zero net worth.)

Among Black households, richer households had 62 times as much wealth as more solvent households in 2021. This was a significant decrease from a ratio of 136 in 2019. Likewise, the ratio of the wealth of the richer to more solvent among Hispanic households decreased from 45 in 2019 to 28 in 2021.

This ratio is smaller among White and Asian households, but it edged down within each group during the pandemic – from 18 in 2019 to 12 in 2021 among Asian households and from 14 to 12 among White households.

Considering the large disparities in wealth within all racial and ethnic groups, it is not surprising that rich households in each group hold most of the total wealth among a group. But their share inched downward during the pandemic.

Among all U.S. households, the richer 25% of households held 82% of the wealth in 2021, not counting the wealth in the hands of the top 1%. 1 This share was less than in 2019, when it stood at 84%, but it is large by any standard.

Uneven wealth distribution is more pronounced among Black and Hispanic households. Within these two groups, the richer 25% of households held 90% and 85% of total wealth in 2021, respectively. These shares were somewhat less among White (78%) and Asian (75%) households in 2021. Only Black and White households experienced a statistically significant decrease in the share of wealth held by richer households among them from 2019 to 2021.

About one-in-ten U.S. households (11%) either had no wealth or were in debt – owing more than the combined value of their assets – in 2021. This was an improvement over 2019, when 15% of households were in this position.

Black households were the most likely to be in this situation: 24% of them either had no wealth or were in debt in 2021. The shares of Hispanic (14%) and multiracial (16%) households with no wealth or in debt were similar in 2021. For these groups, the situation in 2021 was either the same as or an improvement over 2019. White and Asian households were the least likely to have no wealth or be in debt in 2021 (9% and 7%, respectively).

• Estimates by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System show that the richest 1% of households hold about one-third of total household wealth in the U.S. ↩

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