You can't wait to get rid of poverty to improve education. You have to educate children where they are, at what level they are. Some people can do this; most are probably not great at it.

First of all, there is something that used to be called direct education. It requires an extra person in the classroom, like an instructional assistant, but it has kindergarteners reading at probably 4th grade levels. It works. I have seen it. I have seen the children read. No reason not to do that with most children who need it..some don't need it and some will not work well with that kind of instruction..but if you have a poverty-stricken school I would start with that.

You need good or perhaps excellent trades and pre-professions and all sorts of guidance and instruction on how to prepare for college or further technical schools in the high schools. In junior high you need to be teaching them skills that would at least lead to minimum wage jobs and you can..they can cook, they can clean, they can be learning about computers surely. They can work with hand tools. They can sew. They can build things. They want to. THey evolved to do these things and get very frustrated when they don't get to. Boys probably worse than girls..

You can provide routes out of poverty through occupational education. Skills can be sold. A student who had serious cooking classes in middle school can get a job more easily than one who has not. A student who has had a couple of years of pre-nursing training can probably get a job to work her way through nursing school. THey can graduate with less debt. There are tons of work study jobs..or were..more than were students to fill them in colleges I have worked at.

You need school nurses. They are practical, intelligent people. You need a principal who takes charge of discipline and does not say oh the vice principal is in charge of that and I will do the loftier stuff. You need home economics and you need shop and you need typing and computers and some highly technical stuff. We need to produce students who can survive bad economies, bad parenting, terrible tragedies like Sandy..would you rather have kids in your neighborhood who knew some home construction and some mass cooking and some health care if you had a situation like Sandy or would you rather that they were made to read Catcher in the Rye until they "got it." Would you rather have a daughter who could repair her own and your cars? It is not only what is good for the students. It is what is good for their families, their communities. And remember, if they are old enough to drop out of school, they are possibly old enough to have children. They need to be better prepared. They need to be told poverty can be gotten out of, although they might have to move, which is tough.

They need to be taught a lot about alternative energies and electricity..if there are no jobs they should rewire every home on their reservation if needed. They should be able to construct homes. Some do. These are not very high-reaching goals. We used to routinely do it. The wrong people are in charge.