[the_bear]

I went to the University City School District in St. Louis. It was actually a pretty strange place because it's the main district that Wash U (Washington University in St. Louis) is in, so about 10% of the students are children of (mostly white) professors and other very education-oriented professionals (doctors, lawyers, etc). Because of that, top classes (honors and AP) were actually pretty good. I, and many of my classmates went to Wash U and other top universities.

The rest of the student body was made up of poor, mostly black students who came from families where education wasn't a priority. Every single year I was in high school the state tried to revoke our accreditation and we just barely passed a state audit to keep it. I was a math tutor, and it was common for students to come in who couldn't do basic addition (in high school).

To make matters more confusing, the gap between the good students and the bad was almost entirely caused by economics (wealthier parents resulted in smarter kids, as is normally the case) but because the economic divide was almost identical to the racial divide, many of the educational issues were easily conflated with racial issues. This led to the (mostly black) teachers and administration demonstrating favoritism toward white students, and it also created tremendous social pressure on black students not to try to succeed academically (otherwise you're an oreo).

I wouldn't trade my experience there for anything. I received a pretty good education, and I experienced a part of America that more privileged kids should experience, but most of the students at my school were definitely being left behind.

[poppysan]

I can co-sign for the quality of the district he mentions. My nieces and nephew are there now. It's totally an economic issue. My sister-in-law really does care about the education of her kids and their potential future, but she has to work 2 jobs to barely support them adequately. It's a case of survival knocking education down a notch on the priority scale.

[w1ntermute]

What class were you in to be taught that incorrect stuff from your OP? I can't imagine those professors and doctors would let it slide if their children were being taught such nonsense.

[the_bear]

The honors and AP classes were generally pretty good (in math and science anyway) but those weren't always options. For example, in 10th grade, there wasn't an honors world history class, so I had to take the normal class. That's where I was taught what the big bang theory was. I knew it was wrong and tried to argue, but the teacher was pretty sure she was right. I immediately went to my adviser and got switched to a different teacher, but the rest of the class didn't know any better (many of them probably thought the teacher was right).

As for parents not getting involved, I'm not sure I ever told my parents about that stuff because I thought it was normal. Middle school was by far the worst part of the district, and a few years ago my brother and I were telling my parents stories about how about once per week there were school-wide riots in the lunch room that the FAs (bouncers) couldn't contain and we could do basically whatever we wanted for 30 minutes because of the chaos. It turns out my parents had no idea this was happening (my mom said she wouldn't have let me go back to that school if she'd known). We never told any parents because we thought every school had riots like that.