I grew up in Sacramento in the 80's/90's, and the best schools were not in the rich/white areas. The top-performing schools were in so-so neighborhoods, and the schools were very diverse. Best of all, you could test in and enroll from anywhere. We literally had a kid in HS who drove down halfway from Tahoe each morning. It wasn't perfect, but it was much, much better than what we have now, as this article shows.
My understanding is research shows this "evens" outcomes. The worst students do better (Teacher has more time to pay attention to them), the best students do worse (can not get into the really hard stuff, get bored).
If you are in the bottom 25%, you WANT integrated classrooms of all levels.
If you are in the top 25%, you WANT an elite classroom with ramped up work and less distractions.
There is the crux.
Bad cultures exist and we dont need to celebrate them. Bad culture drags everyone down and makes society worse.
We need to ask why those bad cultures exist and take steps to remediate the underlying problems.
In Seattle, one of the richest cities in one of the richest countries in all of human history, some of the public schools still have leaded drinking pipes that "may be safe" for kids to drink from.
For the vast majority of working adults in America, a job means unreliable shifts, being treated with outright cruelty by management, and pay that isn't enough to cover health insurance premiums.
Given that, why is anyone surprised that kids don't "apply themselves"? What are their parents going to say? "Work hard and you to can be in debt and barely afford to pay rent!"
The district charter use to have a line in it saying they had to offer each kid the best education possible. My mother used that line to force the school district to send a taxi to every day to take me up to a richer part of the city with better schools. That line of the charter has since been removed as from what I can tell kids now are at the mercy of their circumstances.
There is some fair arguments to make that mixing kids of different backgrounds together improves outcomes, if you take 1 kid from a poor background and surround that kid with a culture of success, there is a very large chance the kid will pick up on that culture of success and start doing better.
So, kernel of truth behind some of these policies.
IMHO the problem is, this plan only works if the vast majority of students are high achievers. If you have 10% of the students who are high achievers and you mix everyone together, after a few years you end up with no high achievers.
America in general needs to seriously look at how we as a culture approach education, until we fix that, there isn't much the schools can do to actually improve outcomes for underprivileged students en masse.