When we moved to the US, I attended schools where the students were mostly poor and Black. My kids attend public schools that are not much better. To combat the issue of hunger, every student is given free breakfast, and free lunch if they lack the means to pay.
It was my experience that many of the kids who did not do well in my school either did not show up, or if they did show up, they ignored the teacher and any assignments. After school, they hung around and got into fights. Of course there are some kids who have to work or deal with abusive parents. But there are a bunch of them, at least when I was in school, just did not care. This was not only about one race of kids. Then there were poor kids of whatever race who studied in the library before and after school when home was not conductive to school work, and at least paid attention and did what was asked of them in class, since they had to be there anyway.
I would love to hear some solutions to motivate people to act in their best interests. I understand that we are talking about groups of people, but those are comprised of individuals. And each of those individuals face a series of choices every day.
I guess it amounts to whether we believe that those barriers are insurmountable, and also what we believe we can each do to make them less so.
