Recommendation 3

We should create the benchmarks necessary to hold ourselves accountable for providing digital opportunity to all children, guiding the next 10 years of ICT’s evolution in ways that truly help children and families.

• Strategy Summit & National Benchmarks: A panel of experts from across the fields of education, health, youth development, and technology should be convened to examine the ideas in this report and determine the highest-payoff strategies for moving forward. In addition, this panel of experts should oversee the development of national quantitative goals for where the U.S. ought to be in providing digital opportunity to youth by the year 2010—like the U.S. Surgeon General’s goals for disease prevention and health promotion.
  
  
• A U.S. Youth Digital Opportunity Survey should be conducted at least every five years. This household survey would interview parents and young people themselves (as appropriate for age) to obtain an accurate and detailed picture of how ICT is being used, where the missed opportunities are, and the extent to which the disparities along income, racial/ethnic, and disability lines have been eliminated.
  
  
• Digital Opportunity Measures in Children’s Scorecards: We should also build on the Children’s Scorecards, now compiled in every state and in many localities, so they address issues of digital opportunity. While still new terrain for many leaders for children, the digital arena is now so influential in young people’s lives that it needs to be incorporated into any contemporary snapshot of children for it to be complete. Although state-by-state and local data about digital opportunity are still more limited than national data, data for a variety of possible indicators for children’s scorecards exist, and additional local data should be generated.