Archived: The Educational System in the United States: Case Study Findings

Other Concerns and Issues
Although the lack of discipline among students was considered to be a major
problem in inner-city schools, many educators indicated that physical and sexual
abuse contributed to far more serious and irreparable damage to the academic
achievement of some students in these schools. According to the principal of
South Central Vocational High School, many of the behavioral and learning prob-
lems of some of the students at the school are the direct result of physical and
sexual abuse by adults at home and, in certain cases, even at school.
Educators and administrators at schools located in impoverished areas also re-
ferred to the constraints placed upon instruction of high student mobility, a fea-
ture typical of poor communities. It was not uncommon for schools in the inner
city to have more than half of the student body change every year. Schools where
there was high student mobility needed to test large numbers of students each
year if enrollment in classes at different levels was based on student mastery of
the subject. Complicating the problem was the fact that many students moved
into the school district after the beginning of the school year. Thus, testing for
placement into tracked courses created an additional burden for financially
strapped inner-city schools. Furthermore, since the curriculum differed from
school to school, students who moved frequently were at a disadvantage in gain-
ing admission to high-level academic courses.
At West Middle School in West City, a math teacher indicated that only 20 percent
of her students the previous year completed the entire year. Many of her students
move back and forth between Mexico and the United States move for economic
reasons. Explained the teacher:
I have some kids who are coming who are recent arrivals. I have a girl who
sits here who came from Mexico a few months ago, and she is functioning
at a fifth-grade level in Spanish. She is advanced. She knows fractions, every-
thing. And she has a great vocabulary and grammar in Spanish. But she has
no English. Whereas, I also have a kid who just arrived from a small town in
Mexico where he never attended school. All these levels I have here.

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Summary
In the inner-city schools that we visited, teachers reported great difficulty in man-
aging ability differences among students within classrooms. These teachers sug-
gested that the preponderance of social problems in the inner city contributed
to the diversity in levels of ability and hindered their ability to teach the curricu-
lum in a way that would reach and benefit all their students.