by the ignorant. We spend enormous amounts per student in these schools. In reality, spending per student in poor schools is only $500 less than in wealthy public schools, with an average per-pupil spending of $13K nationally. So, you're wrong there. You also don't realize that the low-performing urban schools typically pay higher salaries and often attract some of the best teachers in the business. They're about the only ones who can make it long-term in these schools because the schools mirror, and actually magnify, the social pathologies of the communities in which they're located: zero value placed upon education, little value placed on human life, complete hostility to authority and authority figures, rejection of all the social norms that bind together a functional, healthy community, and acceptance of grift and corruption. Grift and corruption aren't tolerated elsewhere, while they're expected and accepted in these schools. The teaching environment is thus abysmal, and usually dangerous. You know it's bad when AFT and NEA have actually been forced to publicize complaints from their members about student assaults on teachers. The teachers in poor urban schools really aren't any worse than those in other places. Like any corporation's manager class, the teaching profession and our education system are not made on the exceptional teachers, they're made on the average teachers, and average teachers will not fare very well in that type of environment. Very few Americans have a real understanding of how chaotic and divorced these schools are from anything approaching education. Our national averages are pretty bad compared to other nations. If we subtracted the top 10% of high-performing districts, you wouldn't want to know with which ones we'd be comparable, and if we took our bottom quarter, we'd be comparable with what used to be called "third-world countries." A few years ago, a Philly news journalist investigated school performance in the city. He found five...five...entire elemntary schools where not a single kid was reading at grade level. Not one. That had zero to do with funding because Philly schools are generously funded like in most all of our big cities. We've known for over thirty years that more funding does not equal better academic performance, anyways. Pointing to funding is a way for guilt-ridden white liberals to avoid confronting the causes that do not comport with their basic assumptions about human beings and how "systems" actually function, or, in this case, do not function. Their solution to every social problem is to spend more money on it. Rarely does the research support this instinct. Certainly not in education. You can increase spending 25% tomorrow and it won't improve a thing. Things will continue to get worse because the social pathologies in these places continue to grow and worsen.