I was the founding math teacher at a brand new turnaround school with a rookie principal. I had 5 weeks of training, and my job my first year was to prepare my students for the very same state test mentioned in this article. To connect that with the typical HN world, I was literally a day 1 employee at a startup meant to replace an institution that had failed in more or less the exact same situation. Despite the intensity of the experience, it was deeply transformative for me.

To briefly react to this article, I am not surprised. Baltimore is a poor and segregated city. But that socioeconomic stratum has many layers. There are many ways to end up at a better school. Some are selective, others are high demand and have a lottery, still others you simply sign up for. So you need to have good academic performance or have someone looking out with you with even just the modicum of savvy required to simply opt for a better school. If you have neither of those things, you end up going to your default neighborhood school (e.g. any of those 6 mentioned in the article), which is certain to be completely swamped with students coming from deep poverty and social dislocation. These are schools that tend to have the same number of 9th graders as 10th, 11th, and 12th combined, due drop outs and transfers.

I'd be happy to answer any questions.

----

I journaled my experience here: https://alanjayteaching.wordpress.com/?order=asc.

Another Teach For America Baltimore alumnus wrote a book on her experience. I found it to echo many of my own reflections, almost eerily so: https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Terrordome-Years-Baltimore-A....

One of the schools mentioned, Fredrick Douglass High, has a deep history, and its modern day woes were profiled about a decade ago in the HBO documentary Hard Times At Douglass High: http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/hard-times-at-douglass-high....

The real day-to-day experience was much more mundane and psychologically draining over the long grind of the school year, punctuated by sporadic crises and constant minor disruptions. It's an unbelievable amount of work to buy supplies, plan lessons, physically maintain your classroom, perform your material, engage those students, respond to the dynamism of hormonal teenagers, resolve conflicts, grade work, help administer the school, coach, conference with your colleagues, and follow-up with parents. Somewhere in there, you maybe get attend to your own physical needs. And no matter how badly you fuck up, you wake up at 6am to do it all again the next day, and the next.

The challenges you face are manifold. I had a student arrive that spoke zero English. I had students who were refugees from Iraq, one of whom survived a school bombing. I had multiple students return after stints in the justice system. I had one student who lost his cousin, aunt, and grandma all in one day in a fire. I had a 14 year who had never learned subtraction. I had students with deep psychological issues, including one I believe (unprofessional) to be a sociopath. I had one student quietly stay after class to ask me if he could have one of my soups for lunch, since he hadn't eaten all weekend. I had to report one student's account of sexual abuse. I had students in rival gangs, and far worse, students who were gang wannabes. This is just what I remember off the top of my head, year's later.

Put 25 or so students of these students in a room, and you never know what's going to happen in a given class period. The class, like a sports team, succeeds or fails as a unit. Many of these students come from home lives and neighborhoods where the idea of education lifting them out of poverty is demonstrably a total myth. You need to convince them that their whole experience is false, and get them to buy into the idea that solving for x is worth a damn.

That's what it's like.

Not sure if you're a sports person, but imagine if the NBA had a franchise that was never to participate in the draft at all, and everyone kept asking why they never made the playoffs.

Joking aside, I believe the answer is to reframe the question and ask what society can do. The core problem is that nearly all of our efforts to fight poverty are designed in such a way that the less poor you are, the more you're able to benefit. I believe we need to shift our methods to prioritize the people with the deepest need, at every level.

In such a society, schools like these, which catch by far the most challenging demographics, would be by far the best resourced. The goal would be to rehabilitate these most challenged students to decreasing levels of intervention over time.

I guess people like to focus on schools because it ties into the idea that we're a meritocracy ("anyone will succeed, as long as they go to a decent school"). It also lessens the burden for the rest of society - we only need to think about making schools decent enough. We don't need to think about putting more resources into supporting struggling families, or reforming societal structures at the root of massive inequality.

After a few years of living in downtown Baltimore and similar places, I've concluded that equality of opportunity achieved through schools is a crock. My wife and I lived in a high income Baltimore neighborhood (Bolton Hill) adjacent to a very low income one (Sandtown). Our daughter went to a private pre-K. You could put a retinue of Nobel laureates on the faculty of the elementary school in Sandtown and you wouldn't be able to convince the folks in our neighborhood to send our kids there. Trying to fix society with school is like trying to wag a dog by its tail. We're talking about neighborhoods here with massive dysfunction. Where gangs literally divide up the blocks and you'd better be in one or another lest you get beat up walking to school. There are no jobs--you see men milling around the neighborhood in the middle of the day. Teachers can't fix that.

For one thing, we project the merit of parents (or lack thereof) onto their children. We do this in how we allow massive intergenerational transfers of wealth. But also, as you point out, the schools a child can attend are very dependent on who their parents are.

In Chris Hayes' excellent book, Twilight of the Elites [1], he rejects meritocracy. Not only does he reject it in practice, for reasons like those I presented, but he also rejects it even in theory. He suggests that the idea of showering people with resources that show promise is an affront to the concept that every human being has fundamental value and that all should be invested in.

Liberals, broadly speaking, do love schools. But I don't think that's for lack of concern about other issues of social justice! Perhaps you mean economic liberals (e.g. classical liberals and neoliberals)?

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Twilight-Elites-America-After-Meritocr...

From my observation is that the minority. I'm in D.C. where our liberals are of the highly educated, latte-sipping variety. Most believe quite deeply in at least the idea of meritocracy. That's why they're so focused on education: it's easy to point to "failing schools" as the reason for observed injustices if you believe that the meritocracy is otherwise sound. That's why "college for everyone" has become such an issue in mainstream liberal circles.

This divide between modern liberals and leftists was laid bare in the Bernie insurgency during the campaign for the nomination. And the lack of resonance this has with most of "real America" was laid bare in the defeat of Hillary Clinton by Donald Trump. Although HRC handily won the popular vote, the fact that status quo liberalism wasn't strong enough to defeat right-wing nationalism by our bizarre and archaic electoral rules is still quite remarkable. Even more so given that the avatar of said nationalism is a buffoon.

Now that I understand your semantics, I think I largely agree with you.

Actually, liberals are far more likely to focus on the broader social justice issues with the schools as one component. It's conservatives who tend to focus on school performance in isolation (with the usual remedy being various forms of privatization.)

In a less ideological point, I'd argue that a political monoculture is part of the issue. It's hard to hold local politicians accountable if there's no real chance for repercussions for being corrupt or just doing a poor job.

Anyway, in my experience the biggest issue with primary votes is that the vast majority of the population doesn't care, doesn't pay attention, and most don't even bother voting. Check out the turnout for most primaries (and California's "jungle primary" doesn't seem to have helped with turnout[1]), or ask the people around you about the positions between the two candidates in some of the recent local primaries.

[1] http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-meyerson-californ...

California does that for most formerly-partisan offices (excluding Presidential electors), not just Senators.

> In places with political party monocultures it gives alternative views within a party a shot at winning a general election.

Specifically, in urban areas that tend to be supermajority Democrats (there's virtually nowhere with a Republican supermajority strong enough to make it likely that they'd get the top two spaces usually), it gives Republicans, particularly (which are usually the vast majority of non-Democrats) a say in which Democrat gets elected, skewing overall results further to the right.

When you see a lack of accountability, it's mostly a choice being made by people who don't care enough to vote bad politicians out (look at primary turnout rates).

edit: didn't realise who I was talking to, more respect is due (or less opining on 'baltimore' and 'teaching'). I've read some of your journal.

So I think you're right that the American system should seek to have less tests and especially less standardized tests, instead relying more on the pedagogical expertise of teachers. That will be hard to accomplish because it would require somehow implementing another element of the Scandinavian system: teachers have both high competency requirements and high motivation for the field.

   Scandinavian school systems 
   that have demonstrated good results 
   [...] have spent decades gradually 
   de-emphasizing tests and grades.

What conclusion do we draw from this? One might wonder if different demographics do well with different forms of teaching.

But one thing you can say places like Finland and Korea do share is a deeply held cultural belief that everyone in the nation is in it together. What we lack is the same societal norm that it would be unacceptable for children in the suburbs to have all the advantages, while children in cities and rural areas tend to grow up in great disadvantage.

Some say that our size and heterogeneity holds us back. I think that's bullshit. It's a cop out that's ultimately self-defeating for the whole nation.

Lastly, I don't think it's simply arbitrary, whether we pick the Finnish or Korean models, despite the fact that they both appear to produce great results. I think the pressure culture of Korean education is deeply problematic, and Finnish success proves that you can generate well-educated children without forging them in a crucible.

Here's a graph of 'productivity' country vs country. But it has no units ... not sure what to think.

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/country-list/productivity

   Navon Warren grew up in West Baltimore. He was three months old when his 
   father was shot to death. Before his 18th birthday, he would lose two uncles 
   and a classmate, all gunned down on the streets of Baltimore.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/blogs/nces/post/free-or-reduced-price-lu...

> Warren is set to graduate this year from Frederick Douglass High School

A little later in the article Frederick Douglass High School is listed as one of the 6 failing schools.

Currently, to receive mental health services, parents usually need to initiate these requests by navigating through a bureaucratic maze

Or (speculating whildly on something more complex than I'm representing) maybe they could set up some sort of online videochat therapy so those kids who could afford a £35 android phone and wifi could access therapy from outside school?

  > Last year, not one student scored proficient
  > in any state testing.
  >
  > “That’s absurd to me. That’s absurd to me,” says
  > Warren’s mother Janel Nelson. “That’s your teachers
  > report card, ultimately.”

Children need to be taught to take on more autonomy for their grades and other outcomes in their life. It's okay if they need to be spoon-fed a little bit when they first join a school, but they must be weaned off this if they are to have a chance in the "real world".

No.

You are profoundly misunderstanding the situation these kids are in. This isn't happening because these kids are getting "spoon-fed" at school or at home.

Having lived in Baltimore and seen the home life of youth, I can tell you that you would not even believe the appalling, multifaceted dysfunction that is rampant in poor urban neighborhoods.

  > Having lived in Baltimore and seen the home life of
  > youth, I can tell you that you would not even
  > believe the appalling, multifaceted dysfunction
  > that is rampant in poor urban neighborhoods.

For context, my position on this come from the UK education system. My fiancé has worked as a teacher in poor urban neighborhoods in London (Hackney, etc.) for several years so I hear a huge amount about the politics of working in a school and the relationship between teachers and children. I've also spoken to a lot of her teacher friends about this, and what I've said is more-or-less verbatim what they tell me. 'Spoon-fed' was the literal word someone used to describe teaching in an inner London school to me last night.

Baltimore and the United States might be completely different, and I would love to hear your experience on this and whether you have teacher friends there?

Additionally, you should read "The Achievement Gap Isn't About Teachers" [0]. As it points out "there’s just not good evidence that the gap in teacher quality between low-income and high-income schools even exists."

[0] https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/10/27/no-the-achievem...

Using the word "spoon-feeding" implies that the students are coddled to the point that it hurts their development. What is actually happening is that the students have horrific home lives characterized by neglect, bad-influences, and utter chaos. Neglect is the opposite of "spoon-feeding". Students come to school with such deep unfillable needs that just keeping the classrooms from erupting into mayhem is an achievement in itself for the instructors.

... and to respond to the article you cite: I do not believe that the quality of the teachers, alone, can be blamed for the "achievement gap". The "Achievement Gap" is a deep systemic problem with multiple causes and horrific outcomes which beget yet more horrific outcomes like some kind of hellacious positive feedback loop.

  > What is actually happening is that the students have
  > horrific home lives characterized by neglect, 
  > bad-influences, and utter chaos. Neglect is the opposite
  > of "spoon-feeding". Students come to school with such
  > deep unfillable needs that just keeping the classrooms
  > from erupting into mayhem is an achievement in itself
  > for the instructors.

In London what I've heard to as referred to as 'spoon-feeding' is the need to break down each lesson into short games/exercises (keyword quizzes, etc), the need to keep children after school for unpaid 'intervention' lessons due to lack of engagement in class/homework, and teacher's providing so much help to kids doing coursework that in many cases when they actually get to marking it they realise that they effectively wrote it.

This is incentivised through the previous teacher needing to set a high predicted grade in order to get a good evaluation, and the next teacher needing to ensure that they reach this unless they want to be scrutinised heavily (and given a needs-to-improve). Apparently "the dropout rate from UK higher education institutions has increased for the first time in four years [...] The dropout rate for young students from disadvantaged backgrounds was rising even more rapidly. It stood at 8.2 per cent for the 2013-14 cohort, up 0.5 percentage point year-on-year." [0]. That might not be connected to student autonomy, but it could be...

[0] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/rise-uk-university...

I wasn't saying you should blame the students: all schools should teach children to take charge of their education and future. This often doesn't happen.

In this case, the natural response will be for the school system to put pressure onto the teachers. This will cause them to leave. The children will then be educated by supply teachers, and the school will have to recruit new teachers into a highly disruptive environment.

This process already happens without the additional press. Often an excellent teacher can move to a school with more classroom disruption and find that they're unable to get through half of the materials that they prepare. This is frustrating.

It's easy to understand why teachers leave schools like this. They remember the schools in which they got kids from low grades to high grades and had the peace in mind to do creative lessons. It's upsetting to be in a situation in which you can't get control of the classroom, are constantly 'ragged on' to work harder, and are held completely responsible for the results of students who make no attempt at all to take part in the lessons you prepare.

Edit: Also, If a school is so bad that you have to move away from it to avoid being considered a bad parent, that reflects worse on the school more so than the parents.

http://www.baltimorecityschools.org/Domain/9530

http://www.baltimorecityschools.org/about/by_the_numbers

I don't doubt for a second that the school systems are letting kids down, at least somewhat. I'm a huge critic of public education, based on bitter experience. On the other hand, schools cannot be expected to produce great results no matter what else is happening in a child's life.

If we were to look at the demographics of these schools, would we find that 99% of the students are black? It matters in this case because there's an epidemic of fatherlessness among American blacks, and it's known to be very detrimental to the development of children. Who knows how much of a role this factor plays, but not mentioning it seems like a doctor not mentioning smoking might be the culprit in a patient's cancer.

If I'm wrong and there's some other more likely smoking gun in this situation, please tell me. I would like to know about it.

Does culture matter?

Most people on Hacker News will breathlessly tell you it does, at least when running a company.

Well how about a community, a school, a neighborhood, a family?

There is a cultural problem, with many layers. 72% of of black children are raised without fathers.

Do people think that might have some impacts on culture, education, discipline, crime, poverty?

To be fair, it's a massive problem (and growing) in latino and non-latino white populations as well. Black populations experienced the issues first, but it's an across-the-board issue for lower middle class and impoverished communities now.

2. Men actually bring some things to family and neighborhood culture. Some people might get offended at this notion, but it's not controversial to say that femininity is wonderful, distinctive, and has special things to offer. But this must also be true of masculinity. I'd argue that men, generally speaking, have different ways to approach the problems you list. This is applying the "diversity makes us better" principle in a place really needing some new ideas and new strength.

"Harder" meaning the affects of poverty, right? Having two parents involved is only one way to address that.

Starting with talking about fatherlessness and "culture" is blaming the victims and, frankly, racist. I'm not saying a cycle of negative learned behaviors is irrelevant but there are so many other factors to address first.

Not just poverty. Middle class single parent households have it harder than equivalent two parent households as well. We respect good single parents especially because we recognize how much harder it is to, say, take classes in the evening or lead the PTA if you're also making sure your kids are clothed, educated, fed, nurtured, safe, and so on.

> Starting with talking about fatherlessness and "culture" is blaming the victims and, frankly, racist.

I don't think this cultural issue is unique to black communities or even urban ones. I've already posted on race and fatherlessness:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14387245

Please stop attacking allies. There's enough convincing to do without outgrouping and ending discussions of important issues by throwing around conversation killing (and frankly inaccurate) epithets.

...as far as blaming victims... I'm not interested in putting anyone in stockades on any of this. I do think we need to recalibrate our cultural calculus on what kids need to properly thrive. Home situations should absolutely be on the table, not for the purpose of judging, but for the purpose of setting expectations for prospective parents, people deciding whether to make marriages work, people picking out potential mates, etc.

Part of the problem, in my mind, is that in our effort to avoid victim blaming, we framed certain life choices as valid forms of self actualization instead of truthfully really hard situations. There has to be a way to be supportive and loving to single parents without also misleading the next generation into thinking that finding committed partners isn't also a big priority.

> ...there are so many other factors to address first.

Are there? Why is the social injustice of family structure on the bottom of the list?

What is it exactly about highlighting this disparity so offends people's sensibilities?

Do you think avoiding this aspect in discussion is helpful?

And as I mentioned before, there are much more obvious problems at work here than fatherlessness. Focusing only on the fact that these kids don't have fathers and ignoring all the other challenges they face is kind of myopic. If you want to discuss an issue, then let's discuss the whole issue.

Bold claim.

> lots of people grow up without their fathers and do great.

"Lot's of people" succeed in poor families, in bad schools, in communities with crime. Trends and magnitude matter.

If the "single-parent" households were more equal across race, then perhaps it wouldn't be an area to focus on.

But they aren't.

> ignoring all the other challenges

No..

> there are much more obvious problems at work here than fatherlessness

> recognizing its lack of relevance.

I don't understand people who dismiss disparities between the fundamental societal structure, the core environment a child grows up in, the nuclear family, of one race to another as being insignificant.

I really don't understand how people can overlook its impact.

It even affects schooling and education, discipline, taking a role in ensuring a focus on "homework" vs getting in trouble / distracted outside of classroom, who children hang out with, why they fall into groups of bad influence as a proxy for male authority figures etc etc etc.

(I am NOT saying single mothers have no impact as well or that they are incompetent. Simply, that their job is made that much harder, and fathers have at least as much impact on child rearing as mothers, perhaps more in certain specific areas or for boys perhaps, and so cutting the parental contribution in half might have detrimental effects.)

http://educationnext.org/one-parent-students-leave-school-ea...

"Family structure has grown in importance over time"

> There's no solution for an epidemic of fatherlessness

Extreme poverty comes to mind.

However, none of it will magically change all that much unless school system changes fundamentally. As of now, schools with most difficult students get less funding and less experienced overworked teachers. They can not suceed, realistically.

Do you think this doesn't matter?

You just spelled out exactly why it would...

edit: I don't think the strong argument is "because you're black" but moreso "because you're not growing up in a two parent / married household"

(Correlation is not causation.. but there's quite a bit of correlation)

http://www.heritage.org/poverty-and-inequality/report/marria...

Shut them down. Seriously. If you are failing this terribly, the very least you owe taxpayers and the poor kids and parents associated with those schools is honesty. Not spin. Not statistical bullshit. Honesty. Shut the damned schools down. The resources we are allocating there are actively working against the public interest.

I'm sure the cries will come out "What to do with these at-risk kids?"

That's a great question, and folks can have a wonderful public discussion about that. Unfortunately, that discussion gets into winners and losers -- various interests have various goals that they want to achieve.

So let's separate that out, put it aside for a few months. For now, close them down. Immediately. Try some brutal honesty and see if it doesn't move the dial forward a little bit.

In my view, the problem is that every kid is guaranteed a chance to attend school. This is even written into some state constitutions. Thus all of the schools are joined together at the hip, even if they don't want to be. The higher functioning schools depend on selective admissions and operating at near capacity, which in turn requires the government to operate last-resort schools.

This is a continuous government bail-out of the selective schools. So you can't just shut it down because the successful kids need it. In fact, periodic or continuous government bail-outs are probably a feature of any attempt to privatize what is necessarily a public good, such as health care and possibly air travel.

I'd prefer a return to totally public education and more intensive efforts to battle poverty and segregation. But a possible measure for eliminating the last-resort schools would be to take the kids who can't get into any school, and assign them to schools at random, then let the successful schools figure out how to deal with them.

The problem I was trying to address in my comment was organizational inertia. If you have scores of people in a big building creating their own system of doing things, it becomes impossible to change those ways. It's not a matter of policy, philosophy, or whatnot. It's simply the way large groups of people operate.

You might be able to take those same teachers and administrators, put them in tents in a park next door, and have vastly-improved results. Or not. Whatever your philosophy of "how to do good school", if it's not working in a particular instance, you have to deal with the organizational inertia first and foremost no matter how you'd like the rest of the game to play out.

Randomly assigning kids to schools would create a dis-incentive for schools to depend on segregation to achieve their results.

In other words, given certain external conditions, there should be no successful schools.

Proceeding down this path of analysis, you should find counter-examples, if they exist, and begin listing conditions that make schooling impossible.

Also not my point, but certainly a fun exercise. So close the schools, provide the useful public services they offer (if any), and work on the larger conditions.

The question remains whether or not the political structure that is paying for and supporting these organizations is honest enough to stop the dysfunction when it's thrust in their face. Even in your scenario, close them.

ADD: I want to point out that there is this Stupid Human Trick we all do: when presented with a situation that involves difficult-yet-implementable decisions, we point to some larger, impossible-to-solve situation and demand that this situation be addressed first. It's a way not to deal with things. I've spent decades watching Cold War arguments play out with "Well, if we had peace in the Middle East, these other things would also fall into line"

We were never getting peace in the Middle East. But it was easier just to throw their hands up and ask for the moon than it was to make the simple, immediate decision that was achievable.

No.

We've invested tens of millions of dollars into each of these institutions. They are not meeting up to the reason for their existence.

Feeding kids, providing a place for them to play sports, and so on? Sounds like we may actually be doing that. Ok, so keep the buildings and fund them to achieve that purpose and that purpose only. Then, immediately afterwards, begin a discussion about education which is separate from the concerns you outline.

The goal here isn't some temper tantrum to punish kids. The goal here is actually being honest about what we are doing and why. If we're honest, we might have a way forward. If we keep up the political bickering, we never will. And the kids will continue to suffer.

Just wondering if we could break the chain somehow. Otherwise I'm going to continue to see dear friends on both ends of the political spectrum wondering how the folks on the other side could be so simplistic and stupid.

sigh.

Could there be some simple and easy ground rules that short-circuit this dysfunctional behavior?

http://mdk12.msde.maryland.gov/assessments/high_school/index...

The article indicates they're primarily talking about high schools (and one middle school). I'd suspect that the testing questions are not too far removed from the HSA (High School Assessment) tests of prior years. The HSA used to be a required test you had to pass to graduate in Maryland high schools (I believe they've changed to a new testing platform in recent years, to something called PARCC).

If you click on the following link, then click on the "What does HSA look like?" tab, then scroll down for Algebra for 2009.

http://mdk12.msde.maryland.gov/assessments/high_school/index...

Looks OK to me, for an 18 year old. Nothing on integration/differentiation or imaginary numbers, and the use of matrices doesn't really show why they're useful - but that stuff can be covered in the first year of college.

--------------------------------------------- Look at the pattern below.

2.6, −5.2, 10.4, −20.8, . . .

If this pattern continues, what is the sixth term? -------------------------------------------------------

which sound like a bad IQ test where any answer is valid but you need to guess what test designer had in mind that evening.

Probably because they had a checklist of "competencies" and tried to separately test each of them.

Sorry. No matter the shape of their bell curve, the article is sensationalist and cannot possibly be correct. What's their source? How can such an absurd fact be so?

Edit: I thought proficient meant "competent" (one of the definitions). According to the article, "Just one student approached expectations and scored a three." whereas 4 and 5 on the 5-point scale were deemed "proficient.". However, I still have trouble believing it. This includes graduates. At Frederick Douglas, just one of the schools surveyed, "half the students graduate and just a few dozen will go to college". Apparently we are to believe that among all these schools, with all its graduates, and all its college attendees, not 1 student scored a 4/5 in English and Math. That's not how bell curves work.

Out of 150 college-bound students, you believe that exactly 0 had a 4 out of 5 in both math and English?

We are not talking about generalities or averages here. The article makes the extraordinary claim of "exactly 0." This is simply an extraordinary claim. Like saying nobody is over 6 feet tall in an American city of a population of 500,000. I mean sure, the average could be lower - but not one?

Since you seem to know a bit more about Baltimore, could you expand on the reason for this extraordinary fact?

Maybe it is a statistical anomaly based on the total number of high schools and middle schools, that 6 should happen not to have any students with an over 4 in math and English. Plus I note that they say math and English. Perhaps if they said "math or English" they would have.

So it definitely seems a bit fishy to me.

Yep. I'm sorry my previous comment was flip. But I totally believe this figure.

I'm from Baltimore. I didn't go to one of these schools. These schools are in totally broken communities where maybe some people do graduate high school but those graduations aren't meaningful in any sense. Those schools aren't schools. They are pre-prisons. The teachers have no chance and kids who may want to learn have no chance either. These are brutal, lawless environments policed literally by city cops.

That there could be exactly 0, zero people who succeed in the environment seems not only possible but actually necessary. These aren't schools. They are pre-prison holding facilities.