Talk about your Catch-22's.
I can see 2 reasons for crappy school performance.
1) The administrators and educators are trying hard ( my personal belief) but the demographics of the school districts is such that the pool of pupils is not education motivated. Trying to teach kids who don't give a shit about learning is the most thankless of tasks.
2) The kids want to learn but the administrators and educators are shit. I find this more difficult to believe. I think most who go into education are highly motivated to do a good job.
I went to the best public school in my district. It was illegal for me to be there, because I lived outside the zone. To be honest, my neighborhood was a little higher up the socio-economic chain at the time. All the schools in my district had the same problems: Over-crowding, poorly-maintained buildings, behavioral problems. All the schools in my district had these issues, except two: The one I went to, and the one down the street from there.
In district 11 in the Bronx, there is a neighborhood known as Co-op City. On Baychester Ave, at the entrance of this neighborhood is what is known as an educational park. In the center is a huge, state-of-the-art high school with its own planetarium, a huge, huge library, 7 floors, and several computer labs. Surrounding this are two elementary schools (each with three playgrounds) and two middle schools, each with a courtyard with basketball hoops. All five schools access the high school's track, field, and tennis courts, and the community's handball courts. When I was in school, these were the newest schools in the district.
Both elementary schools and both middle schools had the same students from the same communities.
But the elementary and middle schools I went to were MARKEDLY superior to the ones just down the street on the other side of the high school. Same district. Same ratio of neighborhood kids to bussed in kids (from the projects accross the highway). How is it then that there was such a dramatic difference in results?
The funds were put to better use at my schools. My elementary school always had new Apple computers in the library and more books. My middle school had a rich music department, and an equally rich visual arts department. We were randomly divided for mandatory fine arts training. I learned to play the bass starting at age 9, and because of that had many doors opened for me both academically and extracurricularly.
More innovative ideas. While other schools were having bake sales, our school had a stronger emphasis on physical fitness, and had book sales instead. We had more field trips than most other schools, often selling candy or gift items to raise money for these trips. Students were grouped together according to their needs which ranged from students so severly autistic they needed one-on-one attention to a student so extremely gifted she required one-on-one attention. (That student went to the best high school in the entire city and graduated in January of her sophmore year.)
More opportunities for parental involvement. Because of the music and art, the creative writing and drama, parents had more invitations to come see what students were doing- and not just their own child, but students doing things their child was not involved in. Because my mother and I were constantly invited to the school in the evening we were there frequently, even though we could not accept every invittion. But asa result, my mother knew the assistant principal, the dean of my grade, teachers with whom I had very little contact, my primary teachers. She was able to develop real relationships and a level of comfort with these people. Frankly, I think it helped.
So what was going on down the street? Why were those schools with the same amount of funding, the same demographic so far behind my schools?
Is it poor administration? Is it underperforming teachers? I doubt it. I think it is more a matter of a lack of imagination. Those schools performed about as well as other schools in our district, just much worse than the ones I attended.