We are general education teachers, yet somehow the issue of teaching special education students is never even addressed. Due to privacy rules, it is standard procedure for my school to not even tell the general education teacher who their special education students are, let alone what their particular problem is. It can take you weeks or months to finally discover that some of your students can barely read at all. Sure, many of these students come from broken homes and worse, but it's also been my experience that there is little or no accountability in public school, mostly because state law won't allow it. You can't get there from here.
Involved parents are also very rare.
Failing students cycle through the system until they get expelled or transferred to the alternative school, where they become someone else's problem. The students that scare me the most are those that don't have a clue that they don't have a clue. They are not rare either. They only come to school because that's where their friends are. Include morality, ethics, and right vs. wrong in that category.