[LouisVanDerWright]

^^^ Jesus dude, he was obviously intentionally making a generalizing statement when he mentioned "asians" for the sake of illustrating his point. You whine about the PC police coming to shut down this conversation and then decide to devolve the conversation into an analysis of how specific of an ethnic group TUP should have used to illustrate the fact that if you emptied out an entire "failing" urban school and filled it with another socio-economic group that the school would instantly transform into an over-performing school. He could have listed a million different groups, but just threw out a massive generalization because the specific group does not matter in the context of what he was saying.

His point is still valid. Let's use a more PC example so as not to offend your fragile ears:

If you took the entire student population of Harper High School in Englewood (one of the failingest of failing schools in the nation) and swapped it out with the entire student population of Deerfield High School I guarantee you that Harper would become one of the best high schools in the state overnight and Deerfield High would be relegated to the various Forbes and US News lists of "top 50 worst things in existence". It has very little to do with the "school" and EVERYTHING to do with the ongoing poverty trap of American inner cities.

Also, it's not about "parent expectations". Children don't do well just because their parents expect them to, children do well because their parents give them the resources to. I've said this before, but the average class size is usually 25-30 students. The average school day length is 7 hours of which probably only 6 hours (at best) is spent in class. That means your average student is getting the direct attention of a teacher for only 1/25 of 6 hours a day AT BEST. That means less than FIFTEEN MINUTES a day of one on one attention per student assuming that attention is evenly distributed to each student which it most assuredly is not.

It is physically impossible for schools to replace the attention and involvement of parent in a child's education. There literally is no way to change this short of reducing average class sizes to say 5-7 students which I don't think anyone would disagree is an utterly absurd notion. Let's say an average involved parent spends just one hour a day helping their child with homework, reading to them (time and again shown to be the best way to increase reading proficiency for children), etc. That's already at least four times as much attention as that child received all day in school.

Most poor parents don't even have an hour a day to relax and eat dinner, let alone to spend reading to each of their children. Many poor parents couldn't even provide the necessary assistance even if they had the time because they may not even understand the material themselves because they too were deprived of the necessary education. There is no amount of government money or teacher training that is going to change this. There just isn't and they myth that there is a way to fund the problem away is wholly counterproductive.

Ultimately I think the only way to truly rectify this problem is to encourage socio-economic mixing on a generational scale. This is obviously a difficult task since different social and economic groups tend to naturally distance themselves from one another like oil in water, but there are fundamental policy changes that can encourage this. The best one in effect today are the magnet schools which often do offer a child who is particularly bright a better environment (i.e. better peers) in which to grow out of the poverty trap. I also think that gentrification can play a huge role in gradually mixing the impoverished back into society as a whole. Gentrifying neighborhoods offer a way out for any of the students fortunate to resist the economic change long enough to reap the rewards of improving peers moving into the area. What other ideas do you all have to address the problem from this angle?