The problem is it isn't primarily the schools, it's the whole environment. A poor student has no time to study because he's busy raising his little sister while his single mother is working two jobs. His neighbors at home try to sell him drugs or recruit him into a gang instead of suggesting that he join the lacrosse team with them.
We keep focusing programs on the very bottom as if the solution is to get literally everyone in the 1st percentile up to the 5th, while ignoring that the 5th percentile is still miserable. What we ought to be doing is fighting the impediments for people at the bottom to break into the middle.
Like, people sell drugs but not sandwiches because the amount of bureaucracy involved in operating a sandwich cart is higher than the margins on sandwiches. Meanwhile selling drugs is fully illegal but the margins are high enough to make up for it.
We've inflated the price of real estate so artificially high by constraining supply that a) people have trouble affording a place to live, but also b) people have trouble affording a place to work -- you can't open a shop if you can't pay the rent.
We keep all of the structural factors that cause their fathers to be in prison rather than in business and then find it shocking that the effects of losing parental income and involvement are more than nothing.
Honestly I don't mind that drug dealers get the book thrown at them, play stupid games/win stupid prizes, furthermore the equivocating and rationalizing around drug dealing having great margins is disingenuous at best and malicious at worst.
There's more to the situation than microeconomic theory and approaching it from a purely economic point of view is dangerous.
If we're going to be serious about why fathers are in prison then it stands to reason that we focus on keeping families together, the vast majority of women that enter single motherhood fall into poverty and welfare. Not only that but they never get out of it and they have to endure mental illness (eg: depression, obesity, addiction) which further complicates family life.
Telling these young women that they're better off alone, that they can find better relationship opportunities, and other pie-in-the-sky ideological claptrap is reckless and negligent. It is truer now more than ever that the traditional family unit is the best institution for ensuring a child's future is secure.
No I'm not saying women should endure abusive relationships but for heaven's sake we have to be honest about the fact that they're better off settling down early than "finding themselves" which we all know is primarily promiscuity, alcoholism, and drug abuse.
We keep focusing programs on the very bottom as if the solution is to get literally everyone in the 1st percentile up to the 5th, while ignoring that the 5th percentile is still miserable. What we ought to be doing is fighting the impediments for people at the bottom to break into the middle.
Like, people sell drugs but not sandwiches because the amount of bureaucracy involved in operating a sandwich cart is higher than the margins on sandwiches. Meanwhile selling drugs is fully illegal but the margins are high enough to make up for it.
We've inflated the price of real estate so artificially high by constraining supply that a) people have trouble affording a place to live, but also b) people have trouble affording a place to work -- you can't open a shop if you can't pay the rent.
We keep all of the structural factors that cause their fathers to be in prison rather than in business and then find it shocking that the effects of losing parental income and involvement are more than nothing.