The article below is why I believe in 1-to-1 computer initiatives and take-home programs. Those who can afford technology for their children give them an advantage (if used properly) because of the additional learning opportunities available on-line or using apps.
There is no evidence to support any notion that income impacts a child's ability to learn. It is the opportunities that children from higher income families have available to them that account for the much of the disparity that exists in the test scores between free-reduced lunch students and their paid lunch classmates.
Take-home computer programs, summer school, and before and after school programs are some ways schools are working to provide opportunities for all students to have similar academic success.
Question- Are them some in Nebraska who are just fine with maintaining the status quo, a difference between how richer and poorer children achieve in Nebraska schools?
This information comes from an article published at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/27/no-rich-child-left-behind/?ref=opinion
"Here’s a fact that may not surprise you: the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families. Students growing up in richer families have better grades and higher standardized test scores, on average, than poorer students; they also have higher rates of participation in extracurricular activities and school leadership positions, higher graduation rates and higher rates of college enrollment and completion.
Whether you think it deeply unjust, lamentable but inevitable, or obvious and unproblematic, this is hardly news. It is true in most societies and has been true in the United States for at least as long as we have thought to ask the question and had sufficient data to verify the answer.
What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially.
One way to see this is to look at the scores of rich and poor students on standardized math and reading tests over the last 50 years. Using information from a dozen large national studies conducted between 1960 and 2010, the rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago.
Children from rich and poor families score very differently on school readiness tests when they enter kindergarten, and this gap grows by less than 10 percent between kindergarten and high school. There is some evidence that achievement gaps between high- and low-income students actually narrow during the nine-month school year, but they widen again in the summer months."
