My sister teaches math to middle school and high school kids at an in inner city Baltimore magnet school. It’s a boarding school during the week and the kids go home for Friday, Saturday and Sunday night. When the kids are home, they have to be ghetto tough to survive. Then the school works hard to take the ghetto out of them Monday-Friday. It is brutal for the kids living in the criminal / no-account world then having to switch to the environment where performance and behavior are expected. Unfortunately, for the past ten years, they’ve probably had a 10% to 20% success rate with their students getting them to be productive, upstanding citizens. The ghetto pull is very powerful for some reason.
I pray that your sister stays safe while teaching. My cousin's daughter is a teacher in a Philadelphia school that is predominantly black, but she is tough. I had two blacks working for me when I was a network manager in SF, difference between them was huge. Black guy from the ghetto, with the speech and mannerisms, friendly with me but very defensive. Black gal from a middle-class suburb family, you'd think she was a white gal if you closed your eyes. The guy didn't want me to visit his home in the ghetto, and always protected my back when we were around unruly black groups. The gal was flustered when I had to send her to the SF jails to service equipment, because of nasty cat-calls from inmates - said she never heard slang like that while growing up. She was well-educated, and I got her promoted to supervisor. The guy couldn't write well at all, and had problems communicating - I coached him about router administration and he got a router engineer job elsewhere. His ghetto upbringing was clearly a handicap.