> Particularly with her students, in an economically depressed, rural area, no amount of teaching skills can offset disinterested parents, dysfunctional family

> Particularly with her students, in an economically depressed, rural area, no amount of teaching skills can offset disinterested parents, dysfunctional family life, hunger, and poverty. Surely the endgame is that an effective teacher can, despite all of this, still attempt to engage with the student and engender some kind of interest in learning the basic skills that they need to survive in the adult world? Maybe every student won't get it but the better that the teacher is at doing this, the better results they will have, with any population.. if this skill set is not natural then teaching the teachers to develop these skills will in turn increase their effectiveness? Identifying the skill set is the difficult part, I think .. and the churn in teaching theory is in part because nobody really is able to define what is successful or not and an election cycle is far shorter than the time needed to prove any particular method.