Fully acknowledge and confront the fact that public education serves as essentially a catch-all social service agency for a significant chunk of our populace and stop pretending it’s just about knowledge-transfer. For kids who come from stable family backgrounds (of whatever composition—-stability and reliability are the keys), and a stable (not necessarily affluent or adjacent—-again, stability and reliability) socioeconomic environment, that model works. Kids routinely make it to high school without being able to read or do math at more than a third grade level, because at some point, we can say well, we can’t solve society’s problems, but we also can’t “penalize” these students by holding them back several years (gotta get ground up by the economic machine as soon as they’re 18), so… well, it’s above our pay-grade. I have seen some interesting work and individual charter schools that are like “full service schools.” The problem is, for every decent idea in a charter school, there are 25 charter schools that are pieces of shit.

I need to go take a shower and get ready for work, so I’m going to stop ranting, but the basic solution is to recognize that one size does not fit all. The career tech-normie hs-gifted division we operate with is too broad-brushed. The school I’ve been at has a shit ton of profound mental health problems among students. Poverty is real but it’s not as grinding as our rival school down the street (the “super ghetto” school I was told), nor is life-threatening violence necessarily a daily companion for our kids as for theirs. Yet we are both Title I urban schools.

It’s complicated, man.