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In my city, the worst schools tend to pay a good 20% better than the best ones, for teachers. They get lots of federal and state aid.

People still usually prefer not to work at them, if they have options, because the work environment is terrible.

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You have to pay more to hire people to do harder jobs.

Absolutely—my point is that these schools aren't behind the "good" ones, funding-wise, and even pay better.

Past a certain not-that-high point, giving schools more money doesn't help them much.

There's probably some astronomically-high level of funding that would help, past some tipping point, by enabling things like single-digit class sizes, tons of social workers and counselors, extensive home-outreach programs, et c., to the point that the staff-to-student ratio is 1:5 or better, but AFAIK no-one's tried that in public schools (that's not too far off from how lots of elite private schools, operate, though, except that they don't need the army of social workers or home-outreach or any of that)

Why is the work environment terrible?

Ever had a 3rd grader threaten to stab you, and look like they really mean it? A second grader call you the c-word? That kind of thing happening basically every day, often multiple times a day?

Credible threats of gang violence on a regular basis. School-wide lockdowns with some regularity due to threats of violence, or violence that has actually occurred. Admin with extremely limited options to deal with any of this, and having to triage their discipline pretty hard, plus having little to no support from home to back any of it up (this is why the stuff in the first paragraph happens constantly—no time or community/parental willpower to deal with it, given the rest of what's going on). Watching the kids suffering from the same shit day after day, plus all the usually-awful stuff they have going on at home, and not being able to do much about it. Seeing kids die or end up in the hospital with alarming regularity. Distressingly young kids plainly high or drunk in class.

Not many people can do that without burning out or giving up and half-assing everything, very quickly.

Hmm, I can't imagine having to deal with those things. People don't act like that where I live.

Sounds like you’re enabling some structural inequality, or something.

I’ve recently become friends with someone from the inner city “hood”. It’s just unbelievable. Like someone below said, it’s not about race as much as poverty. The sad thing from what I’ve seen is the culture is self-destructive. Instead of trying to help each other up and out, many pull others back down (economically, socially, etc). I used to naively think I had answers, but after seeing the breath and depth of the problem I have no idea what would help.

The crab mentality goes hand-in-hand with widespread poverty and lack of community development. In schooling it shows up as bullying those who are most academically successful, for being "nerds" or "acting white".

Lowkey I think the current education system has evolved from communities that allowed teachers to beat their kids to teach obedience. that obedience was passed down through generations in those communities establishing a culture of obedience for teachers. The current system, although non-violent, is still heavily leveraging the culture of obedience from students. when a kid is disobedient, usually the above mentioned communities threaten to move the kid into an environment where the obedience culture is even more strict as a result of even more violent punishment historically. Early days Public school teachers might lightly smack you with a ruler, early catholic school teachers might spank you, and early military school teachers might straight up beat the shit out of you.

So I think by extending the current system to areas in poverty that do not have an established culture of obedience means we have to either change the system or start beating kids again imo. I vote for the former, obviously.

Me neither, because I don't live in the part of town ~10 miles away where this is the case.

Why don't I live there, even though the location would be more convenient and has far more nearby parks and businesses, the housing is dirt-cheap, they have better access to public transit than we do, the area's more walkable/bike-able, et c? The schools are bad.

Why are the schools bad? Because people like me (that is, people whose kids have a low-stress life outside of school) won't move there. Digging out of that hole is nearly impossible. It amounts to "gentrify things all to hell" (which just shifts the problem around rather than actually solving it) or "fix huge social and economic problems the US has".

In either case, you can't do much about it by focusing on the schools themselves.

Consider yourself lucky.

Even worse, imagine being a child growing up in that environment. Actual fistfights were happening every few hours in school where I grew up.

You didn't even get to the covid restrictions, and parents calling teachers anti-American and traitors and Nazis for supporting mask and vaccine mandates. Teachers were getting death threats after being told they were "essential workers" for a year. Meanwhile they have to use their own funds to buy their own body armor, because they have to buy that along with pencils and paper now.

Heh, I omitted that because most of that stuff happens often-enough in our good districts.

And yeah, it's a red state. Even the blue areas are red enough to get plenty of obnoxious assholes harassing teachers.

[EDIT] Downvoters: go talk to some teachers about this topic. I'll wait. It may be a while, because they'll have a lot to say.

Teachers are not always 100% sympathetic. When courts in Illinois shot down school mask mandates, teachers at a high school near me retaliated by sequestering unmasked students in a room and not teaching them.

From what I’ve heard one of the biggest reason is students and parents who don’t care about education at all, who would actively disrupt others from learning and the teacher from teaching.

This is correlated with poverty, not race, per se- it's all about the culture of the students. A relative of a friend is a teacher in rural Iowa, an almost all white school. She teaches young students who have no concept of respect for authority or value in learning- getting cussed out by a kindergartener (ages 4-5) is not exactly an unusual thing she has to deal with.

As kids get older, they fall into drugs and / or have kids of their own and / or are told they'll never get into higher education and / or they don't need higher education, they'll just get a low skill job like everyone else in town.

Education for the sake of education really isn't strongly valued by a lot of parents, who have their own struggles and can't really help with homework much past middle school.

Compare all of this with teaching in an area that is more middle or upper class- kids are usually more eager to learn, have fewer discipline problems, and as they get older many know they need to try so they can get into a community college or university.

Yes, poverty not race. I grew up below the poverty line in a bad neighborhood in Brooklyn. My neighborhood was the background in Hubert Selby Jr.'s, "Last Exit to Brooklyn". My friends were Irish, Italian, Dominican, and Puerto Rican mainly. There were gangs, drugs, violence, throughout my whole childhood in and outside of my family. My parents never finished high school. All of my inner core of friends did OK, because their parents instilled values in them regardless of all the crap around. BTW, without a phone, a TV in the early years, and of course decades before the internet, we were happy in our bubble. I didn't realize how bad it was until I started hopping on trains with my friends to NYC on the subway at 10 and 11 without our parents, and then the world popped open when I went to high school in NYC. Even my friend Junior's sister, who got pregnant at age 14, managed to finish high school there, and go on to college because of a two-parent household and grandma upstairs. I became an honor student, got accepted to major universities, and have been successful considering where I started. To me a lot is the negativity found everywhere. I still have friends from the baby carriage, and it just seems a lot of excuses are made when kids should be encouraged to rise up and try their best given the circumstances. I look at the preface of a book I still have, "The Boy Engineer: The Study of Engineering from Prehistoric Times to the Present (A Popular Mechanics Book Series)" (no gender wars please - the book is from the 50s!), and knowledge is seen as the key to the universe and doing anything you can imagine. I looked at my daughter's high school chemistry text and there is so much about the doomed earth, planet, life, which is OK to an extent given some real world issues, however, it dominates the narrative. Science is seen as limited and a point of view, not the wondrous thing that brought awe to me when I looked at the stars on my rooftop with binoculars with my Mom when I was 8 or 9. I shouldn't mention hearing gunshots one night with her on the roof, but I will for a bit of darkness for the doom-and-gloom types!

PS: I think putting education on such a high pedestal has demeaned the integrity and honor of working with your hands. I also believe it was a panacea given to the poor as a carrot, and is not the only way out of poverty. Hard work counts!

Not who you were replying to, but my grandmother was a teacher and specifically wanted to work in one of these schools to try to help the students in bad situations. She stopped teaching a while ago, but much of this likely still applies.

Basically, the students frequently don't do their homework, students would just not show up to class or outright just drop out, students misbehave more frequently (including violent behavior), parents care less (or at least act like it). The schools also tend to be in more dangerous areas. They had to lock the teachers' cars in a special lot to prevent vandalism and theft.

Basically it was demoralizing and dangerous.

IMO the central problem with US schools isn't the schools. It's our broken policing and justice system, our bad social safety net, and our poor worker protection, among other things like the ongoing consequences of racist city planning. We will never move the needle very much, on school quality, by focusing on schools.

My pet theory that 2-parent homes make a world of difference. Maybe if there was reliable male birth control there wouldn’t be so many single moms working 3 jobs because dad left and the children don’t have a second parental role model, or even a first because they never see mom.

It's a factor among many. The other POV is that single parenthood matters less than you might expect, because others in the broader family or community can contribute to raising those kids. Which might actually work if you had that community orientation in the first place!

At least one resource disagrees [1]

> According to Amato’s research, sociologists warn that many children of single parents are born into undesirable circumstances. These children have a higher likelihood of being poor, committing crimes or using drugs. Many sociologists agree that childhood’s adverse effects outlive youth.

[1] https://www.everydayhealth.com/kids-health/what-are-effects-...

Condoms are a very reliable form of male birth control. And, it may be hard to understand, but there are certain fairly popular subcultures where men brag about how many different kids they have with different women.

Why would that be hard to understand?

Because mainstream culture generally looks down upon "deadbeat dads" and doesn't celebrate impregnating multiple women?

Certainly, the first time someone told me they had 12 kids through 8 women, with more kids on the way, I was completely shocked. Even more shocked when I realized he was bragging about his masculinity, not lamenting "What have I done?!"

Oh, I guess it’s me then, I wasn’t surprised at all when I encountered this.

I'm not sure the broken policing and justice system account for a culture which glorifies violence, rejects education, promotes drug use, and encourages irresponsible procreation. In fact these things are relatively recent changes in poor urban culture, this isn't the mindset poor people had in the 50's (when policing and justice were much, much worse).

I'm not saying that these things are inherently "wrong" (save the violence), only that they can't be expected to produce the same outcomes as cultures which highly value education, nuclear family, sobriety, and hard work. This holds true no matter how much money you add. Any attempt to equalize outcomes without confronting this core reason is doomed.

It doesn't create a poor educational culture on its own, but excessive incarceration leads to more single-parent (even zero-parent, in a sense—think: living with aunts/uncles, grandparents, et c.) families, worse job opportunities, et c, while ineffectiveness at actually curbing crime (despite our high incarceration rate) leaves lots of these kinds of areas wracked with criminality and violence on top of the damage that our policing and punishment approaches do.

That and the school-to-prison pipeline are contributing to the overall problem of—at the heart of this issue—multi-generational, persistent slums. The justice system is far from the only problem, which is why I listed others and left things open-ended to account for the huge list of other things that contribute, but it's part of it. However, I don't think much can be done about it by addressing only issues with the justice system, absent broader social reforms.

Single parent households are perfectly capable of raising children who value education, cooperation, sobriety and non-violence. I would know, I grew up in one, as did many of my peers. The key difference was and continues to be culture. The question is who is accountable for culture? Is it "society", or the individuals who perpetuate that culture in their own households?

It can both be true that a particular single-parent household is very successful, and that if you study an entire population and control other variables, single-parent households are less successful than two-parent households.

Yes it can, but it doesn't follow that these studies are justification for removing accountability from individuals, their households, culture, and practices. Nor does it follow that the solutions are not found in changes to individual behaviour.

> but it doesn't follow that these studies are justification for removing accountability from individuals, their households, culture, and practices.

Cool. I never called for that, so we're not disagreeing.

> Nor does it follow that the solutions are not found in changes to individual behaviour.

This is one of those things that's both true and useless.

> true and useless.

I'm not sure it is useless. If the problems are individual, not systemic, then the solutions lie with individual accountability, not systemic change, right?

I don't think you are correct. Parents not caring is probably one of the biggest issues.

My grandmother would call a student's parents on their home and work numbers multiple times over multiple weeks. She would even provide her home number and say they could call anytime, day or night.

Do you think she frequently got calls back? If you can't even take 20 minutes to call your kid's teacher then you don't care about getting your kid out of an area with bad policing and justice system, racism and bad jobs.

Good teachers prefer to work at schools where students are more responsive. Usually, this happens when parents of students involve in kids' education.

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