ABSTRACT
Despite its rhetoric about equality, the United States tolerates disparities in students' opportunities to learn that are many times greater than the disparities found in other industrialized nations (Darling-Hammond 1997; Schmidt, McKnight, and Raizen 1997). The Maryland Middle Learning Task Force (2000) found the following:
…some middle grades students attend schools with little or no modern science labs, equipment, or technology, while others have sophisticated science labs and four or five internet-accessible computers in every classroom. Some students sit in classes of nearly forty, while others have classes of twenty or less. Some students have few books to use in the classroom and none to take home, while others have an abundance of high quality resources with which they can produce sophisticated work. (p. 33)
