LeBron James school that was considered an experiment is showing promise

(US) I sometimes wonder if fundraising by public schools (bake sales, car washes, etc) should be banned unless the raised funds are distributed evenly across all local public schools based on their headcount. I can't give money to a city or state and demand it's spent in one particular place, why should I be able to do so for a school district?

It is impossible to change the trajectory of a community in one or two years, but the political powers demand measurable results before the next election. The administrators are trapped: they have risen high enough through the system that they are making more money than they ever could as a teacher, and their personal spending expanded enough so they can't go back without significant personal sacrifice (on top of the sacrifices they already made when choosing to work in education). They realize that goosing test scores isn't good for the students, but they rationalize it by telling themselves that if they can manipulate the test scores enough to get central administration off their back, then they can implement the real changes they want. But nothing short of a meteoric improvement will placate the people high enough in the system to be exposed politically, and everyone in middle management is trapped in a cycle of telling themselves, "We just need to do this distasteful stuff this year, so we can really fix things next year."

I was a high school teacher for 9 years, and literally every single year I had an administrator tell me about the plans they had for how they would fix things in the next school year once the test scores improved.

And that's why it's puzzling to me that so many people oppose the lottery.

Success Academy was started in Harlem exactly to try and provide better schools for children even though they were born in a poor zipcode. It's a success is mostly stems from a very hardcore curriculum and the focus on work ethics and by keeping children away from their parents (often bad influence).

You are actually arguing exactly for why the lottery is a better (but not perfect) solution than zip code, it's fairer.

I believe the racial segregation in our country is an enormous injustice that gets short shrift in public conversation. It's so pervasive in our society that we don't even see it anymore. It's role in education is particularly pernicious. I live in Columbus, Ohio, which like many northern cities has an underfunded, poorly performing, mostly black and brown school district in its core flanked all around by well-funded, high-performing, mostly white school districts. My son's elementary school last year had 82% students of color and two miles away in another school district was a public elementary with 9% students of color.

I did some research to understand how things came to be like this in my city, and of course, it’s the typical story of white flight after Brown v. Board of Education. But what surprised me, a white person, was the historical and continuing ambivalence in the local black community with bussing as a solution to racial inequality in education. And I’ve seen that ambivalence expressed elsewhere, too. I was told that prior to Brown v. Board there were excellent all-black public schools. Then Brown v. Board triggered white flight, which drained all the resources from the city core, and eventually even middle class black families who could afford to, got out. The answer is not bussing, not integration, I was told by one thought-leader in the local black community, but quality, well-funded community schools.

I struggle to accept that answer because I know the data shows that minority students benefit hugely when their schools are not segregated. Yet I understand why sending kids to schools that aren’t in their community and where they may not be welcome is problematic. I wonder if the ideal solution isn’t a bussing program that is just as likely to bus a white kid to a black school as a black kid to a white school. But the program would need to be robust enough to prevent or adapt to white flight. Or maybe we should focus our energy on residential economic and racial segregation which, if solved, would also solve the educational segregation issue. I don’t know.

In any case, I’d love to hear any thoughts you might have.