Teachers from “F schools” who transfer to “A schools” magically become “A teachers.” Or so it tends to seem based on how the students perform. Unless the transfer changed the teacher, something else created the F setting. Or go the other way, take accepted “A teachers” and move them to “F schools” and see if the students magically turn into “A students.”

It’s a simple experiment. It makes more sense than assuming teachers decide to fail to teach students in certain schools or that all the teachers in a given school simply can’t teach.

I consider it silly to build structures simply to abandon them a few years later, but that is what our current set-up is bound to do. It also gives them an excuse to move out of neighborhoods which scare outsiders. though. I sometimes wonder if that isn’t part of the dishonesty and the real reason.

David for perfect neighborhoods
perfect teachers
perfect students
proper expenditures of public funds

No reason to keep them open if nobody’s attending and/or learning.

I imagine Spencer Bibbs was the same as other schools. Students attending did poorly. Their poor performance gave the school a bad grade and a bad reputation. This allowed parents who cared for their children to send them to other schools who had students who were not performing badly.

If those children misbehaved badly, they could be sent back to the poor school. The ones not learning tend to be the ones misbehaving, by coincidence. Overwhelmingly, the ones remaining were not going to do well no matter what. This lowered the reputation even more, causing more parents to pull their children and send them elsewhere.

Lower attendance, lower average performance, more problems per student population. Your set costs don’t change all that much but your students being taught drops. What’s more, they are the ones needing the most attention so servicing them makes it even more expensive.

Close down the school. Then find some other school with problems from problem children and repeat the cycle until you have build and abandoned a mess of structures.

This is all based on the concept that poor performance is the fault of the teacher, not the student or how his parent (quite often singular) raised him. This will continue to be a case of dog chasing own tail until political leaders get wise and treat the problem rather than just the symptoms.

Don’t hold your breath.

David for perfect parents