A great way to end segregation like this would be to end the use of property taxes to fund education.
Just have education be something with a dedicated budget. So collect the property taxes collect all the other taxes, but don't have a year to year, district to district, variable amount of funding.
Have a set amount of funding, and ensure that on a per student basis, you have the same ratio of teachers to students, and the same amount of money per student.
It would require only these legal boundary conditions - - I'm not saying mess with the other stuff.
Once you do that, and de-link poorer areas having poorer schooling....
Then allocate money to things like after school programs and remediation for those kids who underperform and do it early.
It will take generations, but I truly believe that if you intervene - - - even if it means having them live away from their parents and home community - - in the education and socialization of underperforming communities, in a few generations, even if you make them strangers to their own communities, by providing them a place to be and things to do after school hours which promote investment in the socioeconomic wellbeing of a larger society, it'll break the poverty/crime/poverty cycle.
I've been involved with a number of charities/NGOs that work in India which provide for 'residential schools' (boarding schools).
They don't work with missionaries, and if there's religious education, they do everything they can to reinforce what the kid's own religion is - - Hindu, Christian, Muslim, whatever.
What they do do, in terms of culture, is - - - -and I know this sounds weird - - - alienate the kid to certain norms.
There is massive poverty in India, and some of these kids have never seen a bar of soap, never seen an electrical device, never seen a shower or a toilet before.
These schools are ones which show them how to use these things, how to do their laundry (the concept of owning more than a single set of clothes is also foreign) etc. alongside regular reading, writing, and arithmetic.
I'm talking about kids who grow up in tribal villages in India, who have never known anything but squatting in a dug out hole to poop/pee in, being shown how to live better.
Their religion isn't disrespected, their traditions aren't either. They're encouraged to practice the arts and language they grew up with while becoming fluent in a larger language like Hindi or English.
Some of them have been in operation for less than a decade, and they've still all turned out very well educated kids.
The most important thing though, is that the kids don't want to return to a certain kind of lifestyle.
They do become kind of alienated to what their parents are used to, there is sometimes some tension.
I know one student whom I met when I was around 15, and he was around 8.
He's going to medical school in India now, and he came from a tribal village in the outskirts of Coimbatore.
It looked like this
When I was doing volunteer work with the medical vans that get sent out, I saw kids with fucking Kwashiorkor's syndrome.
I cannot underline enough how poor these people are.
And some of them go to medical schools
That one student's plan, is to get a residency placement here in the US eventually. He wants to become an internventional oncologist. He's going to one of the best medical schools in India right now, and he grew up in a hut built from straw and literal cow shit
If we can intervene with donation's collected from people in the US, on that kind of scale all across India, and by changing the lifestyle and providing educational opportunities to literal tribespeople, make that kind of difference, I cannot accept the idea it can't be done here in the US.
The gulf is so much narrower, and the money we have is so much greater.
