Unfortunately, the way we like to do business is to try and treat the problem -- locking the barn door after the proverbial horse is well on his way.

The underlying causes here are many, but obviously poverty is first and foremost. We are willing to throw all kinds of money at this sort of problem (metal detectors, guards, etc.) but aren't willing to deal with the bigger problem of urban poverty and unemployment. In many of these "bad neighborhoods", there are almost no jobs, and most parents are getting ADC for their children. Since their only income comes from "parenting", they are incentivized to have kids -- have them early and have large families. Why not? There is little possibility of a job -- most urban areas are so blighted they are bereft of any meaningful employment.

It's the parents, actually, who need education. Uneducated parents aren't capable of raising children who are ready to start school, they can't help with homework, they have no inkling of standards. Parents who can't read aren't going to expose their kids to books.

There is little real hope in these urban neighborhoods, because there are no role models to look to, no good examples. Anyone with the slightest ambition or moxie has long since gotten out.

We also have an asinine system that offers school a mere 180 days a year -- less than half the days in the calendar -- and long months off...and we have this not to benefit students or society, but because it's a holdover from the days of farming and agriculture AND because it is now a locked-in privilege for unionized teachers who like a paid summer break for THREE MONTHS at taxpayer expense. Meanwhile, school buildings SIT EMPTY.

We have school days that end at 2PM or sometimes earlier. That's roughly 1/2 a day. Most trouble (gangs, teen pregnancy) occur as soon as school is out and children unsupervised. And this is BUILT INTO THE SYSTEM, again to satisfy the demands of teacher's unions who love their short days and banker hours. So now we've got the most endangered, vulnerable kids -- and they attending school HALF THE YEAR for HALF A DAY at a time.

Then we have virtually no truant officers, or standards for when kids simply don't show up...as stated in the article, children wander in and out, knowing there are no penalties or repercussions. How could there be? What would be "punishment" when your school is a filthy, rat-invested, leaking prison camp?

Lastly, we have the archaic system that allows children as young as sixteen to drop out entirely, and basically live on the street. If the girls get pregnant and have babies, we give them a living allowance and a subsidized apartment. Nobody seems to have glommed onto the fact that we do not HAVE to allow dropouts; we can demand school attendance until age 18, and back that up with a strict truant program. But it's easier to just let slacking students drop out.

Urban schools are desperately lacking in serious vocational programs -- courses that would help poor kids immediately get decent paying jobs. (Believe it or not, there are still trades short of workers; well-paying things like welding and construction jobs, tool & die, pipefitters, etc.) Plenty of kids would thrive in these areas, but rigid like-minded union teachers and administrators only recognize the system of "college bound or loser/dropout", so there is no path towards meaningful vocational work.

We give housing subsidies to poor families, but those subsidies lock them into the worst neighborhoods and the worst school systems. Gangs can only exist where there is a critical mass of similarly-minded young people -- uneducated, illiterate, unemployed, angry, violent, drug-addicted. Dispersed across a wider population, it would be much harder to fall into gang life. But of course, we are all NIMBYs; we don't want "those kind of children" in our schools.

Busing resulted -- no big surprise -- in cities that are entirely African American or Hispanic, with little racial diversity. Most children in America attend schools that are 95% one race. Many communities continue to futilely bus black/hispanic children from one neighborhood to another, as if that will somehow make things better. Here is a hint: REAL INTEGRATION IS ECONOMIC INTEGRATION, not racial integration. But nobody, absolutely nobody, ever buses affluent kids into poor neighborhoods, or vice versa.

Lastly teacher's unions and their rigid "credentials" ensure teacher shortages, and that the very type of person who will go into teaching is the EXACT wrong person to deal with difficult, rebellious, ornery kids. And they ensure that the very worst, most incompetent teachers are protected from firing...at the same time, the very worst schools can attract ONLY the worst bottom-feeders. Hint: teachers who despise and look down on their students are not going to be able to either help them or educate them.

In any discussion I have ever had about the state of urban schools, these essentials are almost always ignored in favor of "special programs" and "community outreach" and "additional funding". In other words, we see the ship sinking and we prefer to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.