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Forget the nonsense many have posted. It's quite simple really:
People have a choice in the cities, and parents want the best school for their child. First you need to understand what makes a school "good".
1. A solid education backed by the faculties for faster development
2. A solid base for your child to make friendships with successful people's children.
If you attend one of these schools and your child ends up becoming friends with the offspring of enterprising parents, opportunties will open up for your child. It's not unheard of for parents to spend $20K a year (I think the highest in San Jose is $65K) to get their children into a good private school. Of course, you will likely have few (if any) children of day laborers in a school like this.
Private school aside, there are some very good public school districts. However, these are also generally in wealthy neighborhoods. While there is no tuition like the private schools, you will need to be able to afford a very expensive home and pay property taxes on it for your children to stay there.
For the insanely intelligent children in the ghetto, they will likely try to attend a "magnet" school designed for people who have abililty to get them out of the bad schools.
So, what's left? Unlike the schools in SD where a cross section of the entire population attends, the remaining schools are left to be a holding place for kids growing up. The rich are gone, the brightest are gone and your special needs and english as a second language appreciates tremendously as a percentage of students. Nothing wrong yet, but there are additional resources needed to educate these students. But these are generally the poorer districts with less funding. The schools fail as no aspiring teacher would want to teach there unless to be a stepping stone, no aspiring or able student would want to be there and the parents either don't care or don't know enough to get their kids elsewhere. Colleges simply don't recruit from these schools. No hope or prospects, kids turn to other activities. That is what you see in the news.
Welcome to classism in America. It's not the French system, but it's not far off.
You get the award for the most correct post of the day!
They are understaffed. Underpaid.
Go look at a school in a very nice neighborhood, most likely they will have up to date technology.
Go to a school in a poor neighborhood, you will see old equipment
And they will both be public school.
Yes poor neighborhood schools don't have the advantage as those schools in the more luxury neighborhoods.
Everyone knows any money goes to the rich first?
If that's the case, then nice private schools would pay teachers more than public schools.
They are understaffed. Underpaid.
Go look at a school in a very nice neighborhood, most likely they will have up to date technology.
Go to a school in a poor neighborhood, you will see old equipment
And they will both be public school.
Yes poor neighborhood schools don't have the advantage as those schools in the more luxury neighborhoods.
Everyone knows any money goes to the rich first?
Sorry that is not the case in Texas.
Robin Hood funding. All the money goes into a pot and is then doled out to school districts. Property rich districts pay more than they get back and property poor districts get more than they put in.
Title 1 schools get additional federal money.
The kids in the poor neighborhoods have the same technology available to them as kids in the rich neighborhoods.
Robin Hood funding. All the money goes into a pot and is then doled out to school districts. Property rich districts pay more than they get back and property poor districts get more than they put in.
Title 1 schools get additional federal money.
The kids in the poor neighborhoods have the same technology available to them as kids in the rich neighborhoods.
Maybe you need to take this up with your state.
It won't happen here. The very wealthy put their kids in schools to choose their peer group. These families control the legislature, so taxes are low so that they can divert that money to the private schools. So even though education takes up the majority of the state expenditures, it is not really very much per child.
Federal Title 1 funds provide patches of current technologies from time to time, but there's not really a co-ordinated effort that you see in the suburban communities where the PTA makes sure that every teacher has a smart board. These are the schools that Robin has robbed in order to try to make sure that kids in inner city schools aren't so overcrowded that the impediments to learning overwhelm them.
It won't happen here. The very wealthy put their kids in schools to choose their peer group. These families control the legislature, so taxes are low so that they can divert that money to the private schools. So even though education takes up the majority of the state expenditures, it is not really very much per child.
Federal Title 1 funds provide patches of current technologies from time to time, but there's not really a co-ordinated effort that you see in the suburban communities where the PTA makes sure that every teacher has a smart board. These are the schools that Robin has robbed in order to try to make sure that kids in inner city schools aren't so overcrowded that the impediments to learning overwhelm them.
But even with Robin Hood financing in Texas the kids in the poor districts are still behind. It's not just money.
So much time is spent on behavior management and keeping the kids on task it's pretty hard to get any new content in.
It goes back to the source of the achievement gap--the home environment from prenatal care to kindergarten. Betty Hart and Todd Risley did the foundation work in their Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children (1995). Then before age five, the neurological structure of the brain is pruned away, never to regrow the trunks of the cognitive schemata. Every year the divide grows as poor children languish in language-poor, experience-deprived settings, while middle class children spend their summers at camp and the scions of the wealthy travel abroad to experience the world first hand.
I believe that science will soon be able to show that early childhood experience is the key to closing the achievement gap, not on a social level, but on a neurological one. At that point, the discussions surrounding public funding of preschool will have to be seen in a different light. It sounds ominously like Brave New World--who will be the Alphas and who will be the Gammas and Deltas? And will they be content with their role?
In the meantime, I believe that all children should be tested upon entry to kindergarten to ensure that they are proficient in the prerequisite skills. If NCLB is going to mandate that students are proficient, then logic requires that their status upon enrollment be measured to be used as the baseline for school-based learning. When there is hard data that demonstrates that there is a significant cohort of students who enter schooling at age five with the language skills of an average two-year-old, it will be more difficult to assign the blame for failing to meet curricular benchmarks on the teachers. Furthermore, it will be incumbent on the education hierarchy to address the situation responsibly. It does no good to anyone to cry out that it is the parents' duty to be their children's first teacher if they just won't do it. Where are the charities when you need them, because the political will is just not there to add early childhood care to the taxpayers' burden?
Here's the sports metaphor for the day, it being Triple Crown season: The Kentucky Derby pits the top three-year-olds against one another in the first of three demanding races, with the final leg, the Belmont Stakes, being the longest race most of them have ever run. These horses have been bred and trained from birth to be the elite competitors in their field. Imagine a three-year-old colt or filly who had never been bridled or saddled until the first day of racing season trying to compete with the likes of Animal Kingdom or Shackleford. Even if the untamed colt had as much innate potential as the other horses, the odds are stacked so far against him that he wouldn't even be considered unless he were so remarkable that he "got it" on the first day of training.
That is very similar to what we are trying to get our impoverished children to do--be prepared to start the Race to the Top on some random day in their sixth year of life. If I didn't know better, I would think that the race is rigged.
Well, this may sound naive, and ignorant and whatnot, but I have always wanted to know why most (if not all) inner city schools have the reputation of being terrible.
Why is it that these schools have such a bad reputation, and what is it that makes them that way? Why do some of them perform so poorly? I really do want to know why this is. Are all schools in city propers bad?
It is a tangled web but I think it starts at home. You have people who don't value education. It's a downward spiral of ignorance, apathy, and violence. It's hard to get inner city students to think about books when they are confronted with more important issues such as their friends being shot or jumped or where their next meal with comes from. Their focus is day to day. In the upper class schools, their biggest concern is which college they will go to. I don't think there is anything inherently worse about most inner city students. It's just their environment.
It is a tangled web but I think it starts at home. You have people who don't value education. It's a downward spiral of ignorance, apathy, and violence. It's hard to get inner city students to think about books when they are confronted with more important issues such as their friends being shot or jumped or where their next meal with comes from. Their focus is day to day. In the upper class schools, their biggest concern is which college they will go to. I don't think there is anything inherently worse about most inner city students. It's just their environment.
Or worse, whether or not the students themselves will get shot.
So here is my question: Obviously ALL neighborhood in cities are not filled with poor, uneducated people having kids too young and such. For example in St. Louis there are many neighborhoods that are classified as middle-class to afluent. The residents of those neighborhoods talk about how family-friendly their neighborhood is. But none of their kids go to the public school. They either send them to a charter school in the area, one of the cities magnet schools, or they pay tuition to go to the local catholic school. Why is this? If the neighborhood is good, with good families, then it stands to reason that the neighborhood public school would be good as well.
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