I'm a retired, urban school teacher. Everyone I know worked their butts off to teach as well as they could. However, my particular school had a 94.5 free and reduced-lunch rate, which is a marker of high poverty, and a population of at least 50% second language speakers. The hoity-toity suburb next door gets all manner of kudos for its good work. If we traded the populations, then we urban school teachers might be recognized for the talented, hard-working people we are.

Stop picking on students who have the bad fortune to be born in cities with poor school funding. Give them some real dollars, make class sizes smaller so that teachers can attend more closely to needy students, provide more services to second-language speakers, and give as much respect to poor parents as we do to the doctor and lawyer parents. Is it the building's fault?