Aren't school systems primarily managed by their school board, which is elected in the area by the people that live there?

That's naive. Every place I've ever lived in my life I have read eventually how some school board member was funneling money somewhere or injecting their politics into school or generally being a p.o.s. Lots of people get elected to things they have no business running.

Perhaps it's just a poor, uneducated school district where the parents made poor decisions about school leadership which resulted in poor outcomes for students and the state took over to improve things so the students have a fighting chance to improve their future.

Sure, but critical thinking shows this isn't always that simple.

For example, sometimes the criminal committed the crime because they were poor. But yeah, just throw them in jail, I'm SURE that'll work out. Oh, funny, criminal penalties are also heavily handed out along racial lines. Interesting hwo that works, because it's so rife in our society.

It's not hard to imagine these schools are set up for failure and they are cherrypicking only certain "poor performing" schools and not others.