Quote from AAAintheBeltway:
The education unions and the political establishment have it exactly backward on the schools issue. They make the traditional liberal mistake of confusing inputs and good intentions with results. The Washington, DC school system spends as much as any in the country per kid and produces abysmal results. You could literally put the KKK in charge of the DC schools and they would improve. Certainly they couldn't get any worse.
The number one factor is how much the families value education. It's not an accident that the best performing kids are typically asians. This has been said before, and I'm sure someone will accuse me of racism, but blacks in general do not value education. The urban black underclass does not value it at all. We don't need a federal program to teach black kids to dribble a basketball, but for some reason reading is different. We're not talking aobut quantum physics either. Just basic literacy.
The school systems are almost designed to produce poor results. We make it nearly impossible to get rid of thugs, criminals and those who have no interest in learning but make it impossible for anyone else to learn. Liberals are somehow genetically wired to want to sacrifice the vast majority to try in vain to "save" a few incorrigibles. Then there is the union issue. Urban school systems waste most of their resources on redundant layers of highly paid administrators, counselors, assistants, etc. They waste even more on politically connected consultants.
The DC school system hired a new chief, a no-nonsense korean woman. She wanted to get rid of a handful of useless administrators. The unions went ballistic, and it took the mayor's intervention and a vote of the council to make it happen.
It is not a secret how to educate children. The parents and voters just lack the will to make it happen. In the end, racial solidarity and liberal orthodoxy matter more to them than their children.