The problem in the U.S. isn't that we have "good schools" and "bad schools." It's that we have extreme segregation along racial and economic lines. Our policies create pockets of schools that are 90% low-income (and usually a similar percentage black or hispanic). It's a symptom of a society with extreme segregation and wealth inequality, not a cause.
I think "good school district" is coded language for what you're making explicit—a district comprised of schools and teachers with necessary and adequate resources to provide "good/better/best" education.
I don't mean to detract from your point, because I think it is definitely key to education problems nationwide.
Edit: My statement about coded language did not include mention of the segregation and amplified economic disparity/inequality. It was not my intention to omit this as a means of saying it is irrelevant. It most certainly is. I was hasty in my paraphrasing. My apologies to rayiner for detracting from his very important point, which was not what I meant to do.
A good school is one that has the best students. It is often your classmates, more than teachers, who create an environment that is conducive to learning. What seems to be the case is that rich people invest more in their kids, and their kids are simply better students. They are better behaved, with higher comprehension and math skills, and more likely to be better students. That is what creates a good school.
So it is not that schools get richer with better resources (although that too is a factor), but that richer kids with higher parental investment are fundamentally more likely to succeed. That is the real divide.
In essence, people are willing to pay a premium in real estate prices just so their kids would not grow in a community of kids who cannot afford this premium.
"Good school district" isn't code for "rich school district." DCPS is a terrible school district, and spends twice as much per student as the school districts in the surrounding wealthy suburbs. "Good school district" is code for "school district in which we've segregated-out the poor people and minorities."
My point was that "good school district" is coded language, and gives people a polite way to wrap up all of that into a nice-sounding term that lets them avoid admitting the nastier things. As all coded language does.
This is incorrect. All of the public schools in DC are in one school district, so the changing demographics of neighborhoods don't affect how much money is available for any given school in that district. The property taxes are all going into one pot.
In California schools are poorly funded but some public schools manage to raise thousands of dollars per student through the PTA. http://sfpublicpress.org/news/2014-02/how-budget-cuts-and-PT...
When you take away having to deal with problems, good things happen. LOTS of resources can turn toward creating academic achievement. That's how. In my town we have a scourge of overachievers who should be told to go fishing. That's the extent our problems.
The real issue is what causes the problems in poor school districts: Is it being poor? Being black? Are the people who blame "black culture" right? Or is it how we treat the poor and black people, from a very young age?
No. Those people are at best misguided, at worst, racist. If white American culture is the standard against which black American culture is judged, I am still waiting for the evidence that white culture prizes scholastic achievement and general intelligence. The only reason geeks and nerds became cool in America is because, suddenly dotcom riches! Until then there was a long history of media & movies that praised jocks and misanthropes above all else. (Hello, Molly Ringwald, hello Grease.) Today's college sports industrial complex is another sign. So is Fox News. So are the yahoos being elected to Texas schoolbook committees. So are creationists. I could go on....
Of course he coaches basketball but that's almost peripheral (although he also loves winning ). His program is tightly integrated with the rest of a Catholic school. These kids live in a state of despair. He will fight this until his last breath. And he does not fight fair. Bob is a retired parole officer.
If anything, the film leaves me with the unsettling feeling that this is a very hard problem. It'd take decades of failure as a parole officer to make one Bob Hurley, and there seems to be only the one.
Also, the home environment of the students has a huge impact on the school itself, and very little is done to mitigate that by American schools.
With all the raise to the top and gates foundation money floating around since then, I'm sure there is better data now. But, those factors really stuck with me.
What we find is that race matters less than whether or not the kids have the resources and interest to exploit schools properly. The factors behind that are profound - you might consider "The Wire" a dozens-of-hours essay on the nature of the problem and it ended without much conclusion.
My Mom taught poor kids. They were of many races, but they all had the same basic problems.
Finland ethnic groups: Finn 93.4%, Swede 5.6%, Russian 0.5%, Estonian 0.3%, Roma (Gypsy) 0.1%, Sami 0.1% (2006)
Instead, we could transition from a system of state run public schools to state funded private schools. Give each parent a tax credit that they can choose to spend on whatever school they like. Your school's funding is directly tied to the number of students that chose it, not the neighborhood it's in. Remove any restrictions on zoning or the number of schools allowed in an area. Remove the concepts of districts altogether. Get rid of mandatory curricula and give educators room to innovate.
I think the majority of parents out there care about their children and want them to succeed, they just don't have the money or extraordinary amounts of time to ensure it. But with a tax credit system and an abundance of competing schools in every metropolitan area, finding the right school for your kid and actually getting them into it would be much more achievable for a much greater portion of society. Yes, the most dedicated ones that get their kids into a dozen extracurricular activities and help them with their homework and whatnot will always have an advantage over the latchkey kids, but it'd still be a significant improvement over the status quo.
1. Capacity shortages, which could be chronic and affect entire regions.
2. Who bails out the schools that fail? Who pays their creditors off?
3. Who provides seats to kids who can't get into a school, or who get kicked out due to issues that include behavior, special needs, or low test scores?
An additional issue is the efficiency of transporting kids to school when nobody lives close to their school. How many minivan-miles per day are we willing to spend on the dream of privatizing the schools?
I agree that majority of parents care about their kids, but educated parents are vastly better able to discern the quality of a school, and to advocate for the interests of our kids.
The simple fact of having to transport your kids to school -- a burden for the working poor -- coupled with existing economic segregation, means that private schools will still be able to cherry pick which kids they want to serve, based on location.
We already have a pretty robust system for handling failed businesses.
Also, what you describe already exists with charter schools. Charter schools are actually privately run but publically funded: they get funding from the state for each student that enrolls.
It affects other aspects of our society, not just education.
In all subjects - but most especially history - it take decades to undo the damage from the public school system in America. We use it to spin old narrative yarns about what we'd wished happened.