Technology and the income gap among students

This article came up on my Twitter feed and reminded me of a few facts that almost all educators know.

  What a decade of educational research tells us about technology in the hands of underserved students

 No matter what efforts educators make at equitable access to resources in schools, inequality rears its ugly head somehow. When I first entered the field in 1993, the concerns circled around hunger, lack of sleep, no books or pencils or paper in the home, no funding for textbooks in poorer districts. Student lack of food and sleep is still a concern, as is a lack of reading material or transportation to the library for some families. With textbooks being replaced more and more by online resources, technology access is a newer and greater issue. And even with efforts to equalize access, as this article shows, lower income students may not be getting the same opportunity to demonstrate their creative and unique learning styles or presentation skills.

 When I still taught middle school Spanish, I had an eighth-grade student who could not pass a test that I gave him and rarely did his homework. The last quarter of the year, I assigned a project, and assumed I would get similar subpar work from this student. He astounded me by turning in the best project in either of my eighth-grade sections. He had the opportunity to present his work in the more artistic manner that he was comfortable with, and he knocked it out of the park.

 It was a learning experience for me regarding flexibility, adjusting my expectations, and giving students a way to present what they have learned in a way that was less traditional than I had demanded in the past.

 I thought about this student when I read the article regarding technology being used solely for drills for students who are underperforming, whereas higher-performing and often higher-income students are allowed more opportunities for creativity.

 I work in an elementary school that has approximately 65 percent of its student body on free and reduced lunch. When I poll individual classes, I have learned that about three quarters of them from first grade on up play Minecraft. They may play on a $125 tablet because they do not have a desktop or console, but they play. Minecraft has been demonstrated to have educational benefits across the curriculum: calculating area and perimeter and using other geometrical concepts in math, longitude and latitude and other geographical and landform concepts in social studies, geological formations in science, the ability to build fictional settings in language arts. Minecraft is only one example of an idea whose creative manifestations should not be limited to higher performing students so that lower performing ones can drill. So much potential could be lost.