Are We Forgetting Someone?

My mother teaches at an inner city school in Las Vegas. The population is predominantly Latino and has the highest number of homeless students in the Clark County School District. Her school has been the beneficiary of federal Title I funding for the last 5 years but has not been able to meet its mandated "adequate yearly progress". These kids have nothing and if they continue to fall behind the government's enforced benchmarks, they stand to lose even more.

The Title I funding has provided them with specialized classes to bring students up to grade level in reading; they have a full-time science teacher with an expansive lab space and because they haven't been able to improve their scores on the battery of tests they're given day-after-day, they're going to lose the privileges federal funding has provided.

I first read about "One Child Per Laptop" over the summer and I couldn't help but imagine the possibilities that the students in my mother's classes could have if they had access to such a luxury. But while these students are low-income, deprived of resources, often without food and occasionally shelter, programs like OCPL have not been created for American children. I understand Nicholas Negroponte's intention to have his laptops purchased by ministries of education. And I understand that his work led to the development of netbooks and more efficient and economic computers. But the more and more I read about these amazing social ventures for the children in developing countries, the more I feel like we're doing a tremendous disservice to the children in our own country.