You are claiming that poor parents will changed their school choice based on the availability of parent-teacher conferences?
And that the problem of poverty is overemployment, not underemployment?
And that the problem of poverty is overemployment, not underemployment?
In a district in the bay area, one of the elementary schools was given a certain special designation that allowed them to accept kids from the district by lottery. The condition of entering the lottery was as follows:
1. A parent must take a 2 hour tour of the school, tour times were between 9 am and 3 pm.
2. A parent must sign an agreement to volunteer at the school at least 3 days a year.
Number 2 was unenforceable, and many flouted it, but poorer (mostly non-white) families who actually managed to schedule the tour generally backed out upon hearing that requirement.
Diversity plummeted, the school went from 60% white to 90% white in 5 years (though the district as a whole became less white).
This lasted over a decade, and only recently was the system overturned by popular vote. Every incoming class since then has been significantly more diverse.
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The point is that those who can afford to live in the bay area and not work every weekday are the well to do. As a software engineer I can usually just tell my boss "I've got an important personal matter" and get the day off. People I know who work as janitors or barista's often get told "well, if you don't show up you're fired" for the same request.
Another one that's more art focused and requires 4 hours of volunteering PER WEEK is majority white even though whites are 1/3 of the population.
It's bad enough that the school enforces a school uniform in the first place, let alone has the nerve to make parents pay for it.
Uniforms actually help with socio-economic gaps: everybody dresses the same, regardless of whether you can afford more expensive status symbol clothing or not.
It is much harder to tell the poor child from the one who may not have eaten today and might not tomorrow.
It is harder to tell the well-off child from the super-rich child, because the status symbols are in reach of both.
It's not a perfect fix, but it reduces the gaps.
fwiw, I'm also a big fan of uniforms and the uniform separates can typically be purchased at places like Old Navy or Target for <$10/item (compared to my kid's soccer uniforms, which run $300-400 for the kit and have to be refreshed every year).
Various community facebook groups and "buy nothing" facebook groups facilitate giving away items you no longer require. That the items be given for free, no strings attached is often a firm requirement.
School uniforms are a common item to be given away because children frequently outgrow uniforms long before they wear out.
Its very helpful for families with young children as they outgrow clothes incredibly fast and also don't yet have any resistance to the idea of second hand clothing.
In particular, justifying school uniforms because "you can't tell the rich kids from the poor kids" deprives both poor kids from learning how to positively interact with rich kids and rich kids from learning how to positively interact with poor kids. Being able to interact with people of wide socioeconomic diversity is a valuable skill.
I've also heard a lot of anecdotal evidence about school uniforms being problematic in inner cities because they'll inadvertently align with gang colors, meaning that students walking to/from school would have to either bring a change of clothes (and change at school twice a day) or risk being targeted for gang violence.
I don't necessarily disagree, but you can really form any number of arguments and reach wildly different conclusions (try it, for a few you don't like). Without evidence (not anecdotes) to prefer one over the other, you're really biasing yourself to how you feel the world ought to work.
I'd like to see how that requirement would work on the rural poor. I have a suspicion they are far more acquainted with the difference between making a rule and enforcing a rule.
Consider an example. A "good" school might have 100 slots for out-of-area kindergartners, distributed via a lottery system. However, the lottery system uses a biased distribution which preferentially selects from students who have been on the waitlist longer. This system is easily defensible by school administrators in the name of "fairness" to students who have waited longer.
The unspoken desire, however, is to preferentially select students with a higher socioeconomic index, because such students tend to score higher on standardized tests (and therefore maintain the school's current "good" ranking). Asking for this information explicitly is, naturally, forbidden.
Instead, the school waits for parents to come for site visits during working hours. These visits are attended overwhelmingly by stay-at-home parents, which correlate with socioeconomically-advantaged families, for the simple reason that they can afford to have a parent stay at home (the -economic side of socioeconomic). Underemployed parents cannot attend, because they are still working, but usually at jobs which do not offer flexible work hours. Unemployed parents can attend, but rarely do so, because the chronically unemployed statistically come from lower social backgrounds (the socio- side) that either do not value education as highly, or may not know that the concept of "school visits" even exist.
Then, when these parents visit, the schools inform them of the existence of the waiting list. However, information about the wait list (and especially details about its biased selectivity) will not be available by phone or website until enrollment opens. Thus, parents who attend the tours will be preferentially selected, since they are on the waiting list first, and the school can put their finger on the socioeconomic scale without ever asking parents for sensitive information.
For purely public schools which do not allow out-of-area students, this approach isn't relevant, because they are required to accept students from the local area and only the local area. These schools don't care, because the locations themselves correlate with socioeconomic factors, due to property values tracking school achievement.
For charter schools, which pass all students through similar systems, it allows them to accept statistically-advantageous students across all levels, leading to better outcomes overall (and shifting the remaining disadvantaged students, and the correspondingly lower level of achievement they statistically will achieve, to low-income public schools).
Same thing right? There's a large underclass in the US that simply cannot take part in public society activities because they are indentured?
Poverty is a complex issue that cannot be summarized in a single word.