Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt the funding for black and white students really differs that much. You can find many articles claiming this but a lot of this seems to depend how you count and who is counting. The washington post or NYT will run an article claiming huge gaps, while the heritage foundation says it is broadly equal ( https://www.heritage.org/education/report/the-myth-racial-di... ). Some of the best funded schools in the whole…
In California they certainly do. Schools are mostly funded locally. As a result, there are very large funding gaps. And it isn't just liberal media saying it, https://reason.org/commentary/californias-schools-are-failin... says the same. I can't speak to other states. That said, there are a lot of ways to throw money at a problem and produce very little in the way of results. The education establishment is very, very…
I am not going to pretend to know the details of California school funding. But broadly speaking schools which get less local funding usually get more funding from state and federal sources. And the national average per pupil differences between the poorest and richest school districts are really not that large, but these numbers are very tricky (much more spent in nyc than idaho, etc.). Some anecdotes: recently there was a viral video of a school in Indiana, I think Carmel. Everyone was very impressed by the school facilities and it seemed to confirm the prior that rich kids get more funds. But then it turned out the average spending per pupil at that school is less than half the per pupil spending of DC public schools. Now there may be good reasons DC would spend more (COL etc.), but even adjusting for that the spending wouldn't be that different. Carmel just spends the money better. Anecdote 2: I have taught school in rural areas at schools which are absolutely poor in terms of facilities and everything else. I don't think tripling the spending per student would have done anything at all to change outcomes there...the students could usually not make it through a 40 min lesson without attacking each other or totally disrupting things. No reasonable amount of money would have changed this. It is not that expensive to educate a kid, you just need to feed them and teach them things that have been known for hundreds or thousands of years from old books. What is going wrong, I think, does not have to do with differences in school funding.
I think Obama's legacy is yet to be understood. Something like "the inspirational power of the symbol of a black president" is difficult to measure. The worsening race relations and their societal impacts (and their causes) since he took office is also hard to measure. Im curious what your evidence is to say "it seems very important for inspiring US blacks in general". Inspiring them to do what? And how is this quantified? (I guess by asking people "who is your hero" or something).