Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben E Lou
You are grossly oversimplifying a complex situation. In the huge majority of cases, schools don't fail because they need to be "fixed" in terms of better teachers, more resources, etc. They fail because the communities they serve are struggling. Put a bunch of kids in school who are underprepared, often undernourished, and usually don't get the encouragement/motivation that kids in schools that are doing well get, and that school usually performs poorly.
My daughter goes to an elementary school that is a "9" by Great Schools. The district to the southeast of us (a little closer to the "city') is an 8. The district to the northwest of us is a 10. The 8 district has more poor kids of all races than our 9. And our 9 district has more poor kids of all races than the 10. It's not that the teachers and resources are any different. It's the clientele. Sure, poorer kids CAN perform well, but they very frequently start out behind and don't get the support/motivation from home that kids who come from homes of more means do.
In short "fix the schools," quite often means "fix poverty." Sure, I can point to kids who grew up in poverty who made it out. My father is one of them. But for every one I can point to who made it out, I can point to 20ish more who didn't.
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This is also an excellent point. That's not to take away from the resource issue I raised, but yeah - kids who are hungry, who don't get enough sleep because they live in a rough neighborhood, who have to get up earlier to take the bus to school because their parents can't drive them, or who have to walk to school and expend that energy (while still being undernourished), etc...those are all kids whose academic performance is going to suffer to begin with. Then you have the resource issue that limits the quality of the education they can absorb, so far as they're able to absorb an education at all.