The core problem is that the effective route to massive improvements in equality of access to quality public education is basically "solve poverty, and concentrations of poverty", which isn't within the scope of schools' mission and is going to be far harder to sell, politically, take a long time, and be incredibly expensive.
We tried "bussing", which directly confronted parts of this, and it fucking worked, which makes it practically unique among attempts to address this problem, and it was relatively cheap compared to other things we might try that could work, but literally everyone hated it (yes, even the poorer families) so I guess that's out.
I’m a big proponent of leveraging Amdahl’s Law in social policies and that freedom of movement should be promoted culturally given the nature of markets to solve a lot of problems although we have serious gaming and regulatory capture issues in the US that make this pretty naïve. If command economies oftentimes fail to attain resilience and markets have horrific social side effects detrimental to civil society / collective problem solving, as a society we should probably accommodate people to relocate given it’s probably cheaper than encouraging specific groups to relocate geographically. There’s no clear social contract at a point given so many holes and inconsistencies over many decades of back and forth bad faith approaches along with institutionalists myopic to the individual scopes of their well intentioned policies.
Much like the original architecture and UX of welfare in the US had assumptions like a family with a cook at home I don’t think education as an institution is really meeting the needs of the public to be better informed and critical thinking citizens invested in communities and society as a whole.
There’s a big cultural issue currently where people are resistant to move for better opportunities when much of the US immigrant population has thrived over generations specifically by migrating to opportunity areas. Now, many that try to leave impoverished areas are shamed and become pariahs for leaving basically job deserts and the social costs are horrific as people find less and less connection to others.
The core problem is that the effective route to massive improvements in equality of access to quality public education is basically "solve poverty, and concentrations of poverty", which isn't within the scope of schools' mission and is going to be far harder to sell, politically, take a long time, and be incredibly expensive.
We tried "bussing", which directly confronted parts of this, and it fucking worked, which makes it practically unique among attempts to address this problem, and it was relatively cheap compared to other things we might try that could work, but literally everyone hated it (yes, even the poorer families) so I guess that's out.