Educational Technology Isn’t Leveling the Playing Field. In fact, it’s making achievement gaps even bigger.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/06/neuman_celano_library_study_educational_technology_worsens_achievement_gaps.html

This article made me sad.  As a special education teacher, we are taught how to use technology to help 'close the gap' in learning between our students and average students.  In this article, libraries of two close in distance but quite far apart in achievement and socioeconomic status were studied.  I guess I should say, the libraries were the setting of the study, and what was studied was children's learning and academic abilities.
In the two suburbs of Philadelphia, there are two neighborhoods.  Chestnut Hill, which historically has been and remains an affluent area, while, conversely, Kensington is known appropriately as "The Badlands" because of the ill repair of the city, homes, buildings, and streets.  Obviously the schools have to teach the same standards, but as we all know schools are funded based on tax bases.  Simply just studying the academic accomplishments of the two schools would be unfair. However, once both public libraries were stocked with equal amounts of state of the art technology, the playing field had then been changed.
The researchers were trying to prove that if low socioeconomic areas were supplied with newer technology, the gap in academic achievement would lessen.  Unfortunately what was found was exactly the opposite.  Students in "The Badlands" continued to perform significantly below the level of achievement compared to the students from Chestnut Hill.  Of course, this being exactly the opposite of the desired result, they set out to find out why the disparity.
Well, what was found was not all that unique.  Students from more affluent and educated homes are exposed to reading, numbers, letters, and technology used in appropriate, educational ways much earlier and more often than students of less affluent and educated homes.  It was found that the students from Chestnut Hill were supervised how they used technology, while the students from Kensington were less supervised and found ways to make the programs into games, rather than learning experiences.
This is nothing new to educators.  We know the value of supervision of studying, and early reading, writing and number sense helps students learn more, earlier.  And, knowing all of these things, most of the parents who do supervise their students' learning value education and pass that value on to their children.  Now, this does not say that just because a student comes from a less affluent, or poor family, he or she can't become quite intelligent and successful in school and life, but with parents how possess more education and employment, typically their students do much better.