A related challenge is that some schools in the more affluent New Jersey suburbs actually are great and good teachers might gravitate to those (unless a law requires them to live in the district, and I'm unsure of whether NJ has those).

That makes the problems in the schools like my urban high school that much harder to fix: They're bad to begin with, and they can't attract the kind of teachers who could help to turn them around. I feel lucky to have had some teachers who were willing to teach there despite all of its ills.

A few years after I graduated, I heard about a teacher who'd had an excellent reputation when I was there and who'd had her arm broken (!) by a student who was angry about something like a grade. It's a tragedy.