That's hopelessly naive. You assume that the kids in these schools just walk through the door, ready to learn. That's a very poor assumption.
I know a teacher (a very good one, btw) who works in one of the tougher elementary schools in town. It's probably fairly mild by Detroit or Chicago standards, but even at her school the kids come from ghastly situations.
She spends a significant portion of her day just getting the kids to the point where they can think past their mother being beat up by her latest boyfriend; or the kid himself was beat up by his mother and the boyfriend; or they didn't sleep much because of the drug deal that went bad out in the hallway. Often they're considered to be a burden, and their parents just dump them for the day, and the kids know it.
A "competent teacher" in that situation will be successful if she can just create a kid who can approximate civilized behavior for a few hours a day.
I got one better than that. I have a friend who works with the hearing impaired. She has a student that literally does not eat in the summertime. All she has is peanut butter that she eats out of a jar.
Their parents should be neutered and then hung!
I work in some inner city schools and I don’t buy that, not at the K-1 grade level. And I’ve seen some nasty stuff.
These schools have kids for 8 hours a day, from 8:30 AM to 3:30 PM. Are you telling me in 8 hours you can’t get 1 hour of quality time from a kid ? Especially a young kid ?
That’s not what I’ve seen.
I’ve homeschooled - and I know, given even a distracted kid and 1 hour over a morning or an afternoon, you can teach a 5-6 year old kid to read and start doing addition and subtraction.
Yes, by the time you get to 4th grade or above, if you haven’t captured the kid’s attention you probably never will. But before then ? There’s still a lot of hope, given a good teacher and a good curriculum.
Home life creates 80% of early childhood education. By Junior High School a child’s vocabulary is largely set by what happened BEFORE the child ever went to elementary school, and reinforced by what is provided (or not) daily at home through to Junior High. By 9th grade, the graduation rate has already been set.
This is not a crisis in “education,” it is a crisis in social and political culture.