One of the things Obama mentioned last night was about a school that had to stop instruction 6 times a day to wait for a noisy train to pass.
In my school, my room (bungalow) is next to the street, and pretty much ON the playground. I have to stop 400 times a day to let the screaming kids at recess finish screaming so I can finish reading a story to my students. Or I have to wait for the gardener (district or neighborhood) to finish whacking weeds so I can continue to explain "small moments" and "how-to's".
So, these problems of "Learning Environment" exist all over the country, and not just in poor districts. It is a concern of mine that schools don't regulate children during recess, and administrators have no clue that one of their jobs is to see to it that the learning environment at their school is conducive to, well, learning!