[only_as_i_fall]

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.

[j_walter]

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.

[imtringued]

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.