It's not necessarily that the educators aren't high quality, but that the majority of students are there as a babysitting service and take up more time being disciplined than actually getting taught. We always say inner city schools have worse education...but I suspect it's more that the kids that attend those schools are disruptors and the system won't allow them to be disciplined in the way they should be (not that expelling them is the right thing either).
Lots, actually, but it's very resource constrained, so once again, the relationship between money-poor schools and bad students plays out.
There are a variety of diversion programs that have been tried and shown great success with problem kids, but that requires staffing so that disruptors get more teacher attention than they otherwise would in a class of 35. Having competent, active counselling services in schools does a lot, too.
With that said, it's not my wife's experience (as an inner city high school teacher) that disruptors are the problem. They're a problem, but there are lots of ways to handle them, individually or in groups.
The way kids get shafted in poor schools is high teacher:student ratios that reduce or eliminate any individual attention a kid might receive, coupled with poor facilities and supplies. You rightly identify parental involvement as a key factor in school success, but the flip side is that kids lacking parental involvement are denied any individual attention in schools that are simply overcrowded and understaffed. And the kind of attention I'm talking about isn't substitute parenting, it's just following up with kids on assignments and attendance.
Sure, a class size of 35 is a problem. So are a lot of factors that can lead to kids not learning. However the city I currently live in has a 20:1 ratio...and there are plenty of kids not succeeding (better than average though). Another local school in Portland has a ratio of 19:1...and they are 22% proficient in math. Thornwood HS in Chicago...13:1 ratio, but 8% proficient in math. It's not always about staffing...
To what end though...I'm sure 1:1 ratio would be a huge improvement, but at what cost. You always get diminishing returns in these cases which seems heartless...but like with anything there is only so many resources to go around.
99.9% minority students, 94% economically disadvantaged. Testing scores are horrible...across the board. 2.8% percentile for their SAT scores...26% of the students took an AP exam and 3% those that took them scored acceptable (3). This brings up a lot of questions...like why is a school that can barely graduate kids (54%) focused on having 1 out of every 4 seniors take an AP exam?
In my city it's hard to separate the multitude of interrelated issues to say it's any one thing, but something I didn't realize until I moved here is that magnet schools pull out virtually all the competent and interested kids by the time they reach highschool.
Given that, it's less surprising to me that the bottom tier public schools in these areas wind up so much shittier than the average public school.
Can you really blame them? Why wouldn't you want to pull the good kids out so they can succeed? Seems like having tryouts for basketball...you take the best of the best to make the team strong.
What's the underlying factor that makes it possible to only poach the good students?
I'm thinking either it is externally visible or the factor is "solvable" for every student, meaning a school with bad students will receive more policies/measures to boost their performance as everyone is suffering from the same underlying problems. Of course this assumes that poorly performing schools get support at all.
On the surface it might look like it's just about "discipline" but in the kinds of school districts you're talking about the problems are very deep-rooted and multi-faceted. Discipline alone is not nearly enough to address what's going on.
Agreed...but at the school level what can they do? If the parents aren't engaged in their kids getting an education and behaving (for whatever reason)...it's not really the school's job to fill that gap.
Some school districts are now having a measure of success with having ONE school but tracking the kids into "accelerated" or "regular" programs and elevating the resources for both.
This happened as a result of a large-enough number of well-to-do parents no longer being able to get their kids into very desirable and academically rigorous city-wide schools, so they effectively "took over" a neighborhood public/charter school by participating VERY HEAVILY in the PTA, the school's funding, and getting deeply involved with the ALL the kids, teachers and administration.
From what I can tell, it required a very uncomfortable and ongoing dialog about race and class. Not every school in every big city can do this, IMHO, but AFAICT it lead to better outcomes for all the students, including the at-risk students.