> Students who don’t want or care to perform. won’t, no matter what you do for them or to them. <
I spent quite a few years teaching in urban high schools. Oh, the stories I could tell. Anyway, in even the worst ones, I’d say that at least 75% of the kids would be willing to give learning try.
If you took your time with them, and were patient, your could make progress. Some of my fondest memories as a teacher are working with those kind of students. Since they knew so little, every advancement was a big deal.
So why are the scores so low? It’s that remaining 25%. Those kids are chronically disruptive. They will do more than just not pay attention. They will talk on their cellphones in class, get up and walk around, push other kids, etc. And if they are feeling particularly feisty, they will threaten you.
The administration will not remove those kids from the classroom. That would be politically incorrect. So you, the teacher, must play cop all day. It’s very difficult to teach when playing cop.
Can you explain how school bureaucrats actually define "homeless?" Its a comment which one sees more and more in saccharine news articles about public schooling, and as one would expect, the quoted number only goes up over time. I assume also its in the interest of the public school bureaucracy to make a crisis of this as well.