Ways Sought to Lead Poor Onto Information Highway : Computers: Technology access creates a dividing line. Gore to discuss ‘safety net’ in L.A. today.

The computers were humming on the third floor of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South-Central Los Angeles as programmers busily tested software--part of a fledgling experiment to bring the computer to an area known more for high crime than high tech.

In the poverty-plagued city of Cudahy to the east, a learning center has been given pricey portable computers to use for lesson plans and other take-home projects. The Elizabeth Learning Center, whose student population is 90% Latino, has access to laser disc encyclopedias--replete with film, sound and color graphics--and other high-end tools, thanks to the Los Angeles Educational Partnership.

“This is the way of the world now,” said Anola Hubbert, who has been teaching at the school for nine years. “It can only help.”

That may be, but access to newfangled technology by the poor and disadvantaged is seldom seen in urban or rural America beyond the odd exception of the Bethel church or the Cudahy learning center.

As computers become as common as the electric typewriter a generation ago, another invisible line is being drawn between those with the power of the computer and those who would not know a megabyte from a Big Mac. The poor are barely on the service road of the much-vaunted information highway.

The problem may only worsen in the short term, as a combination of poverty and shrinking school funding exacerbates a widening technology gap that separates the computer literate from those who reside in what is increasingly described as the nation’s “information ghetto.”

“The problem is that many people do not have a clue about what is happening in high tech,” said Kamal Al-Mansour, whose Los Angeles-based Afrolink Software caters to subjects of interest to African-Americans “There are a vast number of people who are going to be cut out of the loop.”

The Clinton Administration is the first to acknowledge the computer’s importance in the daily lives of Americans.

In their 1992 campaign manifesto, President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore promised to build a national information network that would connect every home, business, library, lab and classroom by the year 2015.

In a December policy speech, Gore called for a “regulatory safety net” to make sure the nation is not split into a society of “information haves and have-nots.” The vice president is scheduled to give a more detailed explanation of how to construct that safety net when he visits Los Angeles today for a “superhighway summit” at UCLA.

Evidence continues to mount that a problem exists. A 1992 study by the Brookings Institute estimated that computer use in school is strongly related to income--that the child from a well-to-do family is twice as likely to use a computer as a child from a poor one.

“If you give anyone the tools, they can become successful in that field. The inner city has not had access,” said Chet Holmes, whose Positive Technology Inc. is operating in the Bethel church.

Increasingly, even the most menial jobs are in some way connected to the computer. Warehouse workers, for example, may be routinely asked to follow a computer’s instructions, or may be fired for failing to meet computerized productivity goals. One recent estimate is that 38% of all American workers use computers on the job, and that future workers will require sophisticated knowledge beyond merely pushing computerized buttons.

“The kids who don’t have a background in computers will end up using computers, but they are usually cash registers or bar-code readers” said Charles Piller, an editor at MacWorld Magazine, published by MacIntosh Corp. “It’s no different than an assembly line.”

Beyond the workplace, having a computer and a telephone is a way to link up with vast electronic data bases that experts say will become the primary information resource system in the next century.

The world has shrunk, but not evenly, said Michael Stricklin, a communications professor at the University of Nebraska and long a student of the computer age. Instead, he said, it is a place of peaks and valleys.

“Those who are on the peaks have access. The ones in the valley don’t,” he said. “The poor will always be with us and that is true with the information highway.”

American Visions, the magazine of the African-American Museums Assn., is sponsoring a computer symposium later this month in Washington to discuss how high-tech tools can be used to help minorities in the next century and perhaps extract them from those information valleys.

Publisher Timothy Jenkins said minorities must focus on high tech to maintain an even footing in today’s world. He said the issue has been overlooked by the traditional black leadership in favor of the conventional civil rights agenda.

Part of the reason, he said, is that black leadership is made up mostly of older men who did not grow up in the age of computers. But he also laid some of the blame on the lack of focus by computer companies on the minority community.

“The industry has not exercised itself to adopt any of its outreach or software to the minority community,” said Jenkins. “All of the images are little white kids with standard names and suburban life. I do not see anything from computer companies in the black media, no effort to reach the inner city with laboratories.”

Jenkins said he began to have concerns as he attended several large technology shows around the nation. He said that of the thousands of people who attended, almost all were white. And most of the minorities in attendance worked for the larger corporations, rather than for themselves.

“That’s the kind of alarm that sounded in my head,” he said.

In response, Jenkins called for the American Visions symposium, saying it would serve as a “cultural brain trust, enabling us to collectively think through how we can ensure the long-term value of this revolutionary breakthrough in technology.”

Despite the widening chasm, there are notes of hope. The computer is being touted as a major tool that, over the long haul and with access for all, could help break down the learning barriers in education.

In an article published by the Aspen Institute last year, Francis D. Fisher, a fellow at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs in Austin, Tex., created a scenario in which a disadvantaged, Spanish-speaking family of the 21st Century, using a television equipped with a computer chip, could obtain everything from language lessons to health care information.

The mother, for instance, could connect to her daughter’s school and hear from the girl’s teacher what sort of homework had been assigned that day. She could keep track of the family application for an apartment in a public housing complex, and her son could work on his English lessons at his own pace.

“The real power is that it permits individual instruction,” Fisher said in an interview. “It won’t be like having a class that will bore the bright ones and be over the head of those at the other end.”

However, experts stress that high tech is worthless in the hands of an illiterate, and that basic skills such as the ability to read are essential.

MacWorld’s Piller said the onus is on the American teaching system to make sure that computers in classrooms become more than glorified typewriters.

“The first computer in each classroom should be on the teacher’s desk,” he said. “There should be sophisticated in-service training, not four hours a semester. If the teacher doesn’t get it, the kids won’t.”

What will happen in the near term is very much up in the air as the pace of technology moves forward at a speed that is at times dizzying while educational funding is woefully lacking.

California, despite being the home of the computer chip, ranks 44th in the ratio of computers to students in its public school system. The state spends slightly more than $2 a child on technology, compared to the leader, Texas, which has committed to spending $35 per student per year. Gov. Pete Wilson recently likened the state’s schools to being “stuck in the age of the Pony Express.”

“California is so abysmally behind, it’s a joke,” said Andy Dunau, whose Dunau Associates is directing the technology for the Los Angeles Learning Centers, one of nine nationwide projects charged with developing a “break-the-mold” vision for American schools.

William Padia, assistant superintendent of the state Department of Education, said little progress will occur soon because less than 5% of the state’s classrooms are wired for computers.

“If you are talking about the way kids learn through technology and we only have 2% to 4% of the classes that are wired, it can’t happen,” he said.

In that context, the fear among those who speak for the disadvantaged is that a lack of computer knowledge will mean an ever-narrowing field of job possibilities, with minimal skills translating into such low-paying employment as word processing or fast food counter work.

Ray Winbush, an assistant provost at Vanderbilt University and director of the Johnson Black Cultural Center there, likened the computer to the advent of the automobile.

“We don’t want blacks to be able to just drive the auto. We want them to be able to understand the auto, to fix the auto and design new autos” he said. “I don’t want to just see a bunch of black word processors.”

Winbush and others contend that technology should be used to close some of the gaps that now exist in education, that children unresponsive to traditional methods of teaching might benefit from machines that allow them to work at their own pace and, in many cases, be more interesting than a teacher standing in front of a class.

“It’s an opportunity to regain some of the lost ground that has occurred between blacks and whites in education,” Winbush said. “We have the golden opportunity to erase what has not worked and start at ground zero. I simply want black and brown kids to be a part of that process.”

Michelle Parga, who runs the Elizabeth Learning Center’s program in Cudahy, concurs: “Access is the key. And the kids are hungry for it.”

* COMMUNICATIONS PLAN: Tele-Communications Inc. and Bell Atlantic Corp. have unveiled a plan to link 26,000 schools by computer. D1