[truthguy]

Most public school systems in K-12 are failing miserably. The problem is not money. I don't have the data at hand but I've seen the cost/pupil in some of the urban school districts and it's often over $15K/student. And still the achievement is horrible. Somewhere I read that it was cheaper to send a kid to Cal for one year than to put a kid in the Washington, D.C public school system for a year. That's amazing but not surprising. You could spend $30K/Pupil/year and the results wouldn't be any different.

The problem is the parents and the lack of parenting. It's always been the problem and the performance of the school district is just a reflection of this.

An intelligent person can tell you what's wrong in the K-12 school districts. The problem is that so many are too politically correct to state the obvious.

[Dilbert San Diego]

And Washington, DC, public schools spend among the highest per capita on education in the country, and have some of the worst outcomes.

And to be politically incorrect, the vast majority of DC public school kids are a certain minority. And too many people of this minority come from family backgrounds which are not conducive to educational achievement. Anecdotal evidence is that too many of these kids, especially by middle school/high school, deride doing well in school as acting like a certain other group of people, and such labeling is done in a pejorative way.

If too many kids in a school do not have the strong parental and family support, and have a bad attitude about school and doing well in school, then it won’t matter how much money you spend, or what resources you devote to that school, or how many computers you put in, or how many updated textbooks you buy, or what type of performing arts center or physical education facilities such a school has. None of that matters if the kids aren’t there to learn and can’t/won’t behave and do their jobs as students.