"Slush" said:
Ah, now I get it. I stupidly thought that inner city schools were so horrific because the amount of money spent per pupil in the inner city is usually about
half that spent on a child educated in a public school in, for example,
Great Neck, NY--resulting in buildings that are fallling apart, teachers being paid significantly less than those who teach in affluent suburbs, students having to "hold it" all day because they don't have functioning toilets, and a system in which students cannot even take their school books home because they must be shared.
But according to Big Bad Wolf, it's because inner city schools contain "too many non-whites" who are "unruly" "animals". Funny conclusion given that almost all of the Columbine-type incidents in U.S. schools have occurred in predominantly white school districts, perpetrated almost exclusively by white kids.
I don't know. Maybe the reason inner-city schools are so abysmal is because those students--who are, let's try not to forget, also human beings--are viewed as animals by the vast majority of people with the money or power to do something about it.
Opinions vary. You are right, of course, in that spending in suburban districts is often significantly higher than in inner-city districts. Paradoxically, though, teacher salaries are often lower in the suburbs, perhaps because they're such desirable places to work.
US teachers often start out as starry-eyed liberals. Time spent in urban schools usually changes their attitudes, often traumatically. It did for me. In the corridor immediately outside my classroom, there were fights three days out of five. It wasn't whites, nor Mexicans, nor usually Vietnamese doing the fighting. Ah, but now I'm being racist. I'm in correspondence with a colleague in the NYC system. She claims that everyone in her acquaintance has been physically assaulted. But of course, they're racist as well. In fact, come to think of it, the teaching profession has been thoroughly subverted by redneck racists.
Incidents like Columbine attract a lot of media attention, but they're exceptions that prove the rule: suburban schools are idyllic places to work.
In the stifling atmosphere of political correctness now prevailing in the USA, one has to be careful of every word one utters: the thought police are ubiquitous. So teachers are circumspect, employ euphemisms (e.g., "the challenges of poverty and urban education"), and are "racist" surreptitiously.
To give you your due, there are writers such as Jonathon Kozol who argue along your lines, namely that it's disparate levels of funding between urban and suburban schools that's the culprit in differing educational outcomes. I am just somewhat sceptical of this line of reasoning. As I've stated above, it's not out borne out by personal experience. Additionally, it appears that the Europeans and East Asians (and Argentinians, for that matter!) spend only a fraction of what the United States spends on each student. Why do they have such superior educational systems? Clearly funding can only be one constituent of a more complex equation.
I apologise to all and sundry for moving ever further from the original question that started this thread.
