This is a line outside an Apple Store at a Midwestern mall. The store is set to open in about 15 minutes. The techno-literate with money will be able to enter our modern Mecca shortly.

When the country shifted to computerized testing, the children in my suburb suddenly gained a tremendous advantage over the children in the suburb where I had been working. In our more financially comfortable school districts, children start school with iPads and technology. They learn keyboarding in early or mid-elementary school.

Some financially-challenged districts cannot offer the same technological head start. For one thing, these districts may be playing desperate catch up in an attempt to add new Common Core materials, with software falling low on the list of purchase needs because of hardware limitations.

Where I last taught, the school shut down non-testing use of the internet during most of the weeks of the first PARCC test because administrators were afraid students testing would be thrown off the internet and lose their test answers due to lack of available bandwidth. I know a teacher at a charter school that spent months testing because they had to go classroom by classroom due to lack of facilities.

The larger issue is simply familiarity with technology. In 1960,  1970, 1980, and even 1990, technology hardly entered into our educational picture.  Better schools might end up with less fuzzy mimeographs and more free markers for teachers. Students mostly worked from books, though. The differences between math books mattered very little. Wealthier districts might have newer, prettier books, but the content was the same.

Inequities still existed, of course. Sometimes a district did not have enough books to send those books home at night, for example. Teachers in that situation often ended up making copies. If a paper shortage arose, those teachers would have students handwrite out their problems before they left for the day.

But the playing field remained much closer to level. Now, technology has changed the game. It took me a while to find the words to articulate my concern, but I finally put this together: What we are seeing is a shift from a change in degree between our wealthier and less financially fortunate schools to a change in kind.

Those schools that cannot offer free and easy access to the technology of our time are necessarily substandard — and entirely inadequate. Their students cannot receive an equivalent education. As part of our move towards Common Core and computerized testing, many districts are adding technology, but the technology is being added in response to the need to test.

What government and administrative leaders need to understand is that technology in education is not a means to an end. That technology should be seen as an end in itself. All of our kids need to be able to easily manipulate the technological tools of our time.

A few posts back I talked about differences in the financially comfortable district in which I live and the impoverished district in which I worked. Let me add another difference as food for thought.  Where I live, the high schools offer an AP Computer Science program with an emphasis on programming, coding and algorithmic structures. Where I worked, the school offers no regular computer classes at all, although the school did pair with a local corporation for an industry-related IT project opportunity.

Our financially-challenged districts are trying, but computer education teachers and new technology often cost more money than they can find.