And close to half of teenagers in the bottom income bracket have to do their homework on a cellphone occasionally or often. Black teens are especially burdened by the homework gap: One in four of them at least sometimes struggle to complete assignments because of a lack of technology at home. In what’s often referred to as the “homework gap,” the unequal access to digital devices and high-speed internet prevents 17 percent of teens from completing their homework assignments, according to the new Pew analysis, which surveyed 743 students ages 13 through 17. It’s a glaring irony that’s also a major force behind class- and race-based discrepancies in academic achievement. This is despite an emerging reality in which poorer students are attending schools that evangelize technology-based learning while their more affluent counterparts, as The New York Times reported this past weekend, are “going back to wooden toys and the luxury of human interaction.” The problem is particularly acute for low-income families: One in three households that make below $30,000 a year lacks internet. households with school-age children lack high-speed internet at home. Yet despite the seemingly ever-growing embrace of digital learning in schools, access to the necessary devices remains unequal, with a new report from the Pew Research Center finding that 15 percent of U.S. Nearly half of all students say they get such assignments daily or almost daily. One federal survey found that 70 percent of American teachers assign homework that needs to be done online 90 percent of high schoolers say they have to do internet-based homework at least a few times a month. Most schoolwork these days necessitates a computer and an internet connection, and that includes work to be done at home.

For the vast majority of students, that's no longer the case. In decades past, students needed little more than paper, pencils, and time to get their schoolwork done.

The homework gap