I think this is because of the poor neighborhoods where there is a lot of gang activity and crime. That happens where there is poverty.
America has spent trillions of dollars trying to get to the root causes of poor education outcomes and we've even done massive experiments on your question. Here from the
National Bureau of Economic Research:
Neighborhoods and Academic Achievement: Results from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment
Families originally living in public housing were assigned housing vouchers by lottery, encouraging moves to neighborhoods with lower poverty rates. Although we had hypothesized that reading and math test scores would be higher among children in families offered vouchers (with larger effects among younger children), the results show no significant effects on test scores for any age group among over 5000 children ages 6 to 20 in 2002 who were assessed four to seven years after randomization. Program impacts on school environments were considerably smaller than impacts on neighborhoods, suggesting that achievement-related benefits from improved neighborhood environments are alone small.
That's a large experiment, 5,000 kids of varied ages and followed for seven years. Lot's of time for good neighborhoods and schools to influence the kids
Well now, I KNOW that is just not true. I grew up in a small town, and there were not many black kids that I went to school with, but the few who did attend were very smart kids. It's because they grew up in a more middle class environment instead of in the ghetto and had the same opportunities. I think a lot of students would do a lot better with better teachers, better learning environments, etc., and all that comes from better funding and, of course, again there is the dastardly teachers union. Lol!
Spend a minute and think about this data:
Their performance wasn't due to going your school, it was due to their being born to middle class parents.
I disagree. Better schools and better teachers turn out better students. There is the point that different people learn at different levels though, but there are no easy solutions for that in the public school system. It is what it is. It's the best we have right now for those who cannot home school their children for whatever reason.
It's hard to do better than
Princeton High School - fabulous teachers, well funded, rich neighborhood, professor's kids:
An uneasy amalgam of pride and discontent, Caroline Mitchell sat amid the balloons and beach chairs on the front lawn of Princeton High School, watching the Class of 2004 graduate. Her pride was for the seniors' average SAT score of 1237, third-highest in the state, and their admission to elite universities like Harvard, Yale and Duke. As president of the high school alumni association and community liaison for the school district, Ms. Mitchell deserved to bask in the tradition of public-education excellence.
Discontent, though, was what she felt about Blake, her own son. He was receiving his diploma on this June afternoon only after years of struggle - the failed English class in ninth grade, the science teacher who said he was capable only of C's, the assignment to a remedial "basic skills" class. Even at that, Ms. Mitchell realized, Blake had fared better than several friends who were nowhere to be seen in the procession of gowns and mortarboards. They were headed instead for summer school.
"I said to myself: 'Oh, no. Please, no,' " Ms. Mitchell recalled. "I was so hurt. These were bright kids. This shouldn't have been happening."
It did not escape Ms. Mitchell's perception that her son and most of those faltering classmates were black. They were the evidence of a prosperous, accomplished school district's dirty little secret, a racial achievement gap that has been observed, acknowledged and left uncorrected for decades. Now that pattern just may have to change under the pressure of the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Several months after Blake graduated, Princeton High School (and thus the district as a whole) ran afoul of the statute for the first time, based on the lagging scores of African-American students on a standardized English test given to 11th graders. Last month, the school was cited for the second year in a row, this time because 37 percent of black students failed to meet standards in English, and 55 percent of blacks and 40 percent of Hispanics failed in math.
One of the standard complaints about No Child Left Behind by its critics in public education is that it punishes urban schools that are chronically underfinanced and already contending with a concentration of poor, nonwhite, bilingual and special-education pupils. Princeton could hardly be more different. It is an Ivy League town with a minority population of slightly more than 10 percent and per-student spending well above the state average. The high school sends 94 percent of its graduates to four-year colleges and offers 29 different Advanced Placement courses. Over all, 98 percent of Princeton High School students exceed the math and English standards required by No Child Left Behind.
If Princeton High School can't solve that problem, then what do imagine we can do that isn't already being done?
