Ok, 'education' is more than Calc and AP-US History, it's learning to live in your world and make of it what you will. Education does not start nor stop at the classroom door, it's an all-day and all-night thing. You are 'educated' by your whole community, including the cops that keep putting your step-dad in jail and your math teacher and your pastor, everyone.

So, trying to distance the classroom from the very real problems that these kids have outside of it is nonsense. You just cannot learn math without food in your belly or a 'safe' home, like, this is Maslow 101 stuff. A neighboring school district has a free/reduced breakfast and lunch program and they are kicking ass in SAT scores relative to my SO's school. You can polish the inner workings of a school to a mirror shine, but if the kids got no sleep or their mom just got shot up and died, it is totally mute.

You are saying that by the time the kids reach HS, if they are this damaged, just triage them. Well, this is kinda being put into practice these days. It depends on school district, but yeah, it's kinda charter school or bust now. Those folks that are too damaged to learn about King George from ~250 years ago are kinda just left behind. How that triage method figures into the 2016 election should be obvious in the results we have.

Look, you are on HN, I get the mindset here, you can just 'process' and 'app' your way out of any problem. If you haven't yet done so, work harder, take more LSD micro-doses, Juicero it, like, I get this a lot on here. But if you really are interested in the schools of this country, then you gotta listen to the teachers and admins and the kids.

Shit. Is. Fucked. Yo.

Why? Literally millions of reasons from literally millions of districts and millions of students. Where we are the issue is simple: poverty. Where you are, who knows. Go to your next PTA meeting in August and try to find out.