urbanSTL

^ That, but 6-12.

Take them as far from the bad setting as possible for as long as possible.

^ The uncomfortable issue with "overhauling education " is that what works for middle and upper class students - due to broader socioeconomic and cultural factors - is not the same as what works for lower class students. This is why SLPS can have both spectacular and terrible schools at once. It's one thing to say we need to put kids from severely dysfunctional nabes and families into an alternative setting and make them wear uniforms for the sheer purpose of minimizing their exposure to the corrupting environment they come from. It's quite another thing to suggest doing the same to generally well-adjusted kids from middle and upper class families that tend to come from families that value and support education, and for whom the current model of public education has worked well over the years (assuming a high proporition of middle-class families in the schools, so not including SLPS per se, but all the solid-performing middle-class heavy districts in the metro).

The entire school system in America should be overhauled. Every child and teen should be on the exact same reading level no matter where the reside...We're slipping further and further behind other countries

It's not the entire school system. Public schools work well in communities that have a middle class and higher family population, and our public schools are probably this country's single greatest accomplishment.

Where they are failing is places that are overwhelmed with a student population from poor families, in particular multigenerational poor living among other multigenerational poor in neglected neighborhoods. And the reason the problem is expanding is that employment has not recovered from pre-2008 levels, a problem that has disproportionately affected Black and Hispanic minorities that have tended to not be as far along the path of familial wealth creation. These problems also affect poor white and Asian communities, but those represent a smaller share of the Asian and white population than do the poor portion of the Hispanic and Black communities, thus these problems are more visible among Blacks and Hispanics.

If you look at things through a fine grained lens, and acknowledge that poorer communities have different needs (largely as a result of life stresses and/or family history, that their more affluent counterparts do not have to deal with and which bear down on their kids in a negative way) you can make a strong case that children from those settings need to be engaged differently than their wealthier counterparts. Not because they are inherently inferior or stupid, but because when they leave the classroom, the support system their middle class and higher counterparts have at home and in their communities, is largely absent and there is often not the personal attention or money to fill that void.

Start here, and you can address problems like what happened on Delmar head on.

haven't read through the entire thread, but my hometown got a rude awakening recently... http://www.courier-journal.com/story/ne ... p/6981285/