From what I understood of your comment, a black person in a rich neighbourhood should get preferential treatment over a white person in a poor one? Because historically black people were mistreated?

What if white people are, in the future, treated as second class citizens, should AA then be for white ones?

IMO using racist policy to fight racism is just not going to end well.

Ideally yes, the economic situation should be taken into account as well. But what's the use of enforcing this at college level, when for underprivileged kids (any kind - wrong race, low class, bad neighborhood) the ship of chances sailed away already when they couldn't get through a proper primary school? The OP situation will happen again and again, kids with lower scores will get pushed ahead so the average "smartness" of that school will decrease. Because what is good for one individual can be detrimental in general, and what is positive in general can be detrimental for one individual. Just about any policy will have holes through some people will fall, and even if I propose a quality education starting from grade 1, I'm sure some people will point out somebody getting a hit from it.

In my opinion, a possible solution would be to get rid of district based funding for schools and instead fund schools mostly based on student amount. One problem of that model is that it can result in teachers avoiding certain schools because that school having a bad rep and thus that school having to pick worse teachers.

Another solution I could see working is making it much easier for students to go to other schools than the default one assigned to them. Altough, that runs into issues of areas where there isn't any "wealthy" school nearby.

I get that it's an incredibly difficult problem to solve and that, tbh, I don't really have much of a clue how to solve it either. So the best I can do is throwing ideas at the wall to see what is workable, while opposing policies I see that I deem to be actively harmful.

Thinking more about my ideas, I think there is a link, altough can't really argument that one atm, behind "no child left behind" and "bad" schools getting worse.

The problem with getting rid of district-based funding is that the worst schools often already get the most per student funding because the state (at least that's the case where I am!). Ultimately the problem is that more money doesn't necessarily result in better outcomes

I have no idea of specific numbers but this does not seem to fit the anecdotal experience of my city. :/

It is a complex multifaceted situation that might differ based on region, but in my moderately large mid-west city, the difference in curb appeal of the public schools in the wealthy suburbs vs the more urban schools closer to where I lived was wild (and I would expect curb appeal to be the easiest needle to move with just money). Forget the academics and the student environment. The suburb districts were best-in-the-state experiences while some of the high school kids I worked with from the more urban schools just wanted to make it through the day without a knife fight....

In my city, the curb appeal of the wealthy suburbs with good schools is absolutely there too. But the inner city knife-fighting schools actually get more total money per student (because the state makes up the difference and then some). That translates into generally newer school buildings in the city, but generally worse outcomes. Which points to the fact that money isn't everything. Good administration matters. Teacher-student ratios matter. Home life matters. Without those things, more money doesn't solve education problems! Money helps on all those fronts, but it in itself isn't sufficient without good execution

You need to remove insane policy of funding public schools from local taxes.