Many communities in the US actively cripple their public schools via poor funding (and then send their kids to private schools, leaving only the poor behind).
"Segregation Academies", still highly prevalent across the south.
But most of these schools remain overwhelmingly white institutions, both because of their founding ethos and because tuition fees are a barrier to entry. In communities where many or most white students are sent to these private schools, the percentages of African-American students in tuition-free public schools are correspondingly elevated. For example, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, as of 2010, 92% of the students at Lee Academy were white, while 92% of the students at Clarksdale High School were black.[4] The effects of this de facto racial segregation are compounded by the unequal quality of education produced in communities where whites served by former segregation academies seek to minimize tax levies for public schools.
We spend more than almost every country. It's not low in poor areas either; for example, Detroit Public Schools has much higher funding than the state average in Michigan.
It’s complicated by the fact that if you do give the public schools money, they spend it on $10 million football facilities for 15 year olds, this is what happened in our community.
No idea about the specific situation in the US, but in my experience these kinds of distortions are almost always because said public school can only get the 10M for sports facilities because there is a specific fund for exactly this but not general school funding. The school then applies for it anyway because that means they can divert 100k or some other paltry share of said funds to be used for general school equipment etc.
