Read it and get back to me. Instead of screaming "race!" and "more money!" he looks at a large range of data, and a lot of it, which is exactly what you need to do if you want a solution instead of politicking and trolling. If you can't adequately describe the problem and quantify the factors involved--he can't do the latter, but he certainly gets close to the first goal goal--all that's left is belief and ideology.
If you read it, be careful. He uses "poor" and "rich" in what appears to be inflammatory ways that will result in a lot of misunderstood quotes, but really his usage is just non-standard. "Poor" he defines as "parents with no college education" and "rich" he defines as "parents with college education." Mostly because parent education so strongly tracks both family income and student achievement. He's careful to stick to his definitions, and to point out when "rich" and "poor" are nearly entirely income and wealth.
I personally watched one teacher exodus from one school, and I'm watching another. Demographics change. Poorer kids move in. It takes a year or two for the teachers who were good to get tired of babysitting classes full of unmotivated kids and those that cause disruptions. They're reduced to babysitting. Either they're mostly police or they just watch the chaos. So they leave. Those that remain are either exceptional at controlling a classroom while teaching, or they baby sit.
In the first exodus, long since completed, the response was predictable. The reason the school was failing was racism and lack of money to hire good teachers. Except the school plummeted from excellent to mediocre before the exodus began; as the exodus of experienced, good teachers picked up steam the school went from mediocre to failing. During this time the school was renovated and the science labs all brought up to state of the art--in other words, it got a large dose of money. By the time the final "this school is failing" numbers were in the 2008 crash happened and people read the lack of money and the paucity of good teachers in 2009 backwards without worrying about accuracy. It was a convenient scapegoat. One that may have failed the reality test, but a scapegoat nonetheless: racism and funding gaps that resulted in low quality teachers. Even if a large part of the failure was from low SES whites replacing middle-SES whites, with no real change in race on the part of much of the student body. "Racism" a the stock answer. "More money" is another stock answer. And we all like, it seems, to pillory our favorite foes. It's easy thinking, not hard thinking.
That district, that school, was recently hit with a scandal. The administration was falsifying standardized test grades, certifying that students had passed standardized tests, granting school credits to students who never actually took the courses, all to get their students to graduate. "The most important thing is that our students graduate." The district may yet have its certification suspended. It's had a lot of administrators quit before being fired. The superintendent, due to retire next year, mysteriously announced he was retiring a year early ... a month before the scandal broke. Prior to this the district dodged a bullet: It vastly underreported the discipline referrals; it had two files, one "on the record" and one "off the record," esp. for SpEd and minority kids, just to make its stats look good. The audit didn't find the "off the record" files; teachers were afraid to turn in their supervisors.
Part of the problem may be student stress. But also home discipline and child-rearing practices, educational background and prior gaps from previous inadequate schools and home education, motivation over future prospects, understanding how the system works, lack of a social support network, reduced social trust and sense of community, inappropriate peer pressure, etc. . . . This translates even into how low and high SES kids use the Internet when it's made available to each on an equal basis, and absolutely negates equal funding for teachers and school infrastructure or even when failing schools have a higher than average number of counselors per student.
It also accounts for some confusing data. If you take some low SES kids and put them into a high SES school, they do better. But usually that doesn't work--they put a lot of low SES kids in high SES schools. (Think of schools as a "commons": If you abuse the commons, the usefulness and quality of the commons collapses.)
What Putnam doesn't want to admit for all the preaching as to the cures for what ails us is that the overwhelming majority of his remedies do nothing for the current crop of high schoolers. They're multi-pronged long-term solutions, which are what's needed.
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