I don't know. Those parents have their own subpar childhoods influencing their undesirable ideologies and behaviors now.
What doesn't help are the positive, helpful parents removing their students from local public schools. If the school community is positive and their child brings home positive things, that's going to make it more likely for the 'other' families to buy-in. If their only contact are negative phone calls from school and their child only has negative stories to bring home, then it's the same old shit and they have no incentive to improve.
I've always taught at Title 1 schools and have lived in poorer areas and if I may, one thing I've learned is that when people are poor, anything that isn't an immediate need is irrelevant. Following traffic laws? Nah. Holding a door open? Right. Sitting down with my child and asking them about their day, earnestly? Nuh uh. Turning down my music because it's late and my neighbors might not appreciate it? Puh-lease.
I understand this is a wide, general...generalization. It's unfair to many, but it's still real-world observations over the course of years.
Anyway, it's about immediate needs/wants being met. A 20 year old interacts very differently with you if they're texting on their phone than if their phone just got cut off. A parent suddenly doesn't have time to help with homework when they're trying to do the math that gets them to the end of the month (math they struggle with in the first place).
How to provide that? I don't know. Universal basic income? Too liberal, right? Raising the minimum wage? Destroys all small businesses, I know, I know.
Basically what it comes down to is that we have 2 options and maybe both will be required. We're going to need one generation to be amazing and just "get it" and yearn to do better. And we need to remove excuses from the generation before it by just inundating them with assistance. I know, that's a dirty word, but instead of decades of assistance that keeps the same ghettos from the 70s still ghettos today, a one-gen only deluge of help might do it. Might turn a corner. Might move the needle in the right direction.
I doubt any of you will agree, and that's fine. I don't claim to have THE answer, it's just a shot in the dark. But financially, this is superior to what's been going on. It's like a contract with a football player - no one-year deal is a bad deal from the team's perspective, no matter how rich. The problem that hamstrings teams are bad long-term deals. We've had a bad long-term deal with poverty for decades. Cutting a fat, virtual one-year deal is, at least, something different.
Thank you for teaching at poor schools. It takes a special sort of teacher to willingly do that. I am not one of those. I taught at what was supposed to be a magnet middle school for foreign languages, but was at the edge of "inner city-dom." It was not by far the worst or poorest middle school in town. It had no race/ethnic group in the majority. Whites were the largest minority group, then blacks, then Latinos, then Native Americans. I did that for 8 years. It was not a joy for me. Every Sunday evening during the school year, my stomach started twisting into knots in anticipation of the next five days.
Middle school, for one thing, is the pits. I'm sure that most of us remember ourselves when we were 12-14, and we think that we were just fine then. Well, we weren't. Most of us were awful. That's the worst age. And most of the kids, and most of their parents, didn't put much value on the notion of education. We did not set and uphold high standards of either behavior or academic performance. In general, the black kids were the worst-behaved, but there was a quota system on school discipline. We could not have impose disciplinary action on a higher percentage of black kids than the percentage of black kids in the overall school population. The black kids--no dummies--had this figured out and they knew that they could get away with behavior that would get white kids suspended.
All that is to say that what you are doing in teaching impoverished kids is a good thing.
About your recommendations, I think that they are very high-minded, but I don't think that they would work. They are extensions of the same ideas that have failed over the last 50+ years. More federal money into inner-city schools. More before-school and after-school programs. Head Start. Free meals. Free laundry service at school. What all of that has done is to relieve parents of their responsibilities to raise their children properly.
When Hammerin' Henry Cisneros was HUD Secretary during the Clinton years, he had the idea that the way to inspire poor people to move out of poverty was to put them into subsidized housing in middle-class neighborhoods. They would see that middle-class people got up in the morning and went to work, that they that came home at the end of the work-day, that they mowed their yards, that they kept their homes repaired. So middle-class values would rub off on the poor folks, and they would adopt those values, and they would join the middle class. It didn't work. Instead, the middle-class areas that were the recipients of these projects deteriorated, property values went down, and the middle-class folks moved out. So the net effect was to expand poverty rather than to help people climb out of it.
To me, your well-intentioned proposal seems to be to do more of the same. A lot more. All at once. To jump-start a generation of poor minority parents into being being good parents in strong families. But one effect of our anti-poverty programs over the last 50+ years has been to weaken the family structure in poor families, which means, disproportionately, black families. (It's not the only factor doing this--a criminal justice system that incarcerates black convicts longer than white ones is another.) In fact, if you look at poverty rates in America over time, you will find that from 1950 to 1965, they were consistently coming down. More Americans got off poverty during that time--with the benefit of few if any centralized anti-poverty programs. Starting in 1966, the "War on Poverty" programs began to kick in, and the decline in poverty rates stopped. Ever since, it has remained between 11 and 14 percent, fluctuating with the economy.
Just as with many things that the federal government runs, the results were far different from what was promised. The money was spent, and is still being spent, but poverty rates aren't going down anymore. We would have done better, perhaps, to have just cut very large checks to poor people rather than building an armada of social programs that don't work well and often even work at cross purposes.
It doesn't work to say, "Well, they didn't design the programs right--we'll do it better this time." When billions of dollars are going to be spent, our political system isn't very good at making sure that they all go to where they are most needed. Most of it goes to line the pockets of people with connections to powerful politicians and never makes it to the supposed target audience.
One more thing. It is also no good to say, "Well, those white middle-class families should have stayed in the deteriorating neighborhood rather than abandon it." Parents' primary responsibilities are to their own children, not the children of some folks they don't even know who have moved into the neighborhood because of some federal program. Our circles of responsibilities work outward, in decreasing degrees of responsibility. I am responsible to my wife more than I am to the welfare of the other wives in my neighborhood. I am responsible for the welfare of the wives in my neighborhood more than I am for the welfare of the wives on the other side of town. And more for them than for the wives on the other side of the country. Same thing with our parents and our children. It is not right for you or the government to expect that, faced with a deteriorating school system, I will keep my children in it out of a sense that I owe it to the other kids in the school system.
We meet our obligations to those closest to us directly. We meet our obligations to society by being good neighbors, paying our taxes, obeying the laws, and, if possible, through charitable works and donations. (BTW, Americans are the most charitable people in the world.) But my children are not sacrificial pawns to make programs designed by Henry Cisneros and his ilk work. What parents owe their children is the best that they can provide. If that means moving them out of a failing public school system into a better one, then that's what they should do, IMO.
