Sure teachers/school matter, but not as much as the parents from my observation.
Some of them were smart kids, but they had no proper upbringing. They didn't know what to do, how to act, how to be, and the school sure as hell didn't teach them that. The school filled their head with interesting but useless facts, such as George Washington was our first President. Sure, we should know that, but that won't help us navigate the increasingly complex world that we keep building around ourselves.
To put it bluntly, these kids, some of them I called my friends, had no spiritual health (or whatever you want to call it). They didn't know how to force their minds to focus, they didn't know how to prioritize their goals, they didn't know how to make goals in the first place. They did what they were told.
Some of them have moved out of state and went to college (again, because they were told to, our school pounded it into our heads that we need to do well on tests to get into college, as if college was the end goal, or even a meaningful step on the journey of life), and are most likely now in debt in over their heads. Some of them probably lost their jobs, some of them probably lost their homes, some of them probably had kids and now work at shitty jobs just to keep food on the table.
The ones that didn't move out of state? I know that some of them are in prison or jail somewhere (thanks, grapevine). I know some of them do drugs (some of them did drugs in high school just to deal with how shit their lives were, I doubt they quit when they got out of school; nothing hard though, virtually all of them were potheads).
Teachers matter, but your first and most important teachers are your parents. You learn how to be and act through them, and if you don't learn what you're supposed to from them, you're just going to turn into a rather angry human that doesn't really make it in life.
What I'm afraid is, my entire generation isn't going to make it in life, and that is terrifying. I'm 31 now, and if I knew what I knew then, I would have probably kicked a few teachers in the nuts for what they put their students through.
Which is one of the conclusions of series four of The Wire ..
Kids have to be taught how to be normal human beings first, BEFORE school can teach anything. And that education to be a human starts at home, with parents.
How do you fix poverty? By fixing the education.
Oh wait, hang on...
I think there's a distinction between forced poverty and chosen poverty. Are the poor people you're talking about actively trying to become wealthier? If not, then poverty isn't the real problem.
A group of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina got some money from opening a casino. They decided to share profits, giving $6000 a year to each person in 2001 for instance. It's more or less a basic guaranteed income. So what happened to these people who'd lived in poverty before and now got a bit more money?
Children who were moved out of poverty saw behavioral problems declined 40%, crime declined, and high school graduation rates increased. Like magic! See [1] for more. Main takeaway -- money increased parenting quality; parenting is key to success.
Money can solve a lot of problems. Do you know how regular people try to actively become wealthier? They work more hours a week at minimum-wage jobs (ok -- add a second 20-hr/week part time job to your 40 hrs and you make less than 550 extra a month after taxes, and you are working 60 hrs/week so can't care for your own children that well). Or they become real-estate agents. That's a waste of time. If actively becoming wealthier were so easy these scrappy hard-working people would have done it.
I disagree with poverty being the root of the issue. It's one of them, but not the primary one. There are many examples a society was desperately poor but they escaped it with education. Look at some Asian countries. Good example is S Korea. They were desperately poor just barely 1-2 generations ago. The cards were really stacked against the country (no natural resource, infra wiped out by vicious 3 year war, uneducated population, requirement for maintaining large army etc) 6 decades ago, and it was pretty much just improving education that got them out of the hole.
Makes me wonder - has anyone built courseware for 5-15 year olds that dynamically adjusts problem topics based on the interests of the student? e.g., maths problems featuring soccer players (angles, speeds, curves, etc) or maths problems featuring rockets or whatever a kid might fancy.