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0 pointsbnralt2y ago0 comments

Yeah, I always get the impression that the people talking about this really haven't spoken to the people in these neighborhoods. I've walked in neighborhoods here where the longtime residents came up to me and told me I should leave because it was dangerous (and I've spoken to others who have had a similar experience). It's always the people who grew up in suburbs and moved to the city as an adult who are dismissive of crime.

Crime and poor schools are usually what make "bad neighborhoods" bad. It's why many of the people there will save and downsize to move to nicer neighborhoods. Whenever I've talked to people living in those areas, they always want more enforcement and to have their neighborhoods cleaned up.

A lot of people want to speak for the residents there, without ever actually speaking to the residents there.

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geraldwhen2y ago

In my area teachers are assigned somewhat randomly to schools. The goodness or badness of a school is 100% correlated with the kids, not the teachers. A single disruptive child can stop a class. When most of the class is disruptive, good luck teaching anything to anyone

bnraltOP2y ago

Yeah, our government here spent years pouring money into low performing high schools to revitalize them, to little avail. Here's an interesting article on a very expensive (they spend $63,000 a year per student) boarding school they sent some kids to for free, that didn't have much of an impact[1].

Finally, what they did was they decided to split in half the high performing cohort from the best/wealthiest high school into two high schools. This cohort was now much smaller than the maximum capacity for either high school, which allows for a lot of out of boundary seats.

The problem is, even still they don't seem to be able to admit how important a high performing cohort is. If they did, there are plenty of things they could do to attract more of them to public schools and neighborhood high schools. For instance, there's at least one high school in the city that is very low performing, but has a large number of very high performing students in boundary. The parents want the school to guarantee some high level classes for their students, but it won't. They want the school to provide a safe environment, but the school can't commit to that (it's hard to remove students even if they are repeatedly violent). And if they do, they run the risk of national media reporters (who would never send their kids to these types of schools themselves) going after them[2].

[1] https://twitter.com/notcomplex_/status/1762607726817923545 [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/podcasts/nice-white-paren...

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