1. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2019/school-s...
Given the outcomes, intentionally and severely failing students to game well-meaning initiatives smells like high level corruption a la the Cash for Kids scandal.
Someone's getting that funding, sure, but it's not the students or their families.
Teachers in this situation have an impossible job, as it stands they will never be able to make kids with this kind of background succeed, and they haven't been able to for 40 years. Their culpability begins because they are willing participants in this education theater. Its funny that the teachers union will put their foot down about not participating in school because of Covid, but they are very content to participate in a system that condemns a majority of the kids to a futureless life.
By shifting schools to local funded, areas with multiple (segregated) school systems used "plain and simple economic reason" to shut down excess schools to save cost, somehow always the black ones. The proof that blacks could not lift themselves out of these situations was used as further proof of their inherent inferiority, not the systemic racism they faced.
To compound this, states that organized "literacy tests"[1] to vote rarely required them for whites. Further removed from the ability to affect their circumstances, many black communities languished for generations.
As a natural extension of this, many school districts in the US are still operating under unequal resources while their constituents' tax revenues go towards the landscaping and infrastructure costs of wealthier areas, while the blame is placed on the victims (eg- "absent parents" who are largely working class victims of exploitation from extreme rent seeking, over-policing harsher monetary and legal penalties, payday loan traps, and other things you don't encounter in wealthy areas).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test