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This is the problem isn't it. I'm all for giving disadvantaged minorities a leg up, but our changing demographics means that there are too many disadvantaged minorities to spread out. I'm fine sending my kid to a school that's 5% or 10% black. I'm not fine sending my kid to a school that's 50% black. So people pull their kids out, or move to a different school district, and pretty soon we have schools where everyone is a disadvantaged minority and they all suffer.
I live in a lily-white area of a lily-white, high income town. But when I looked up the demographics of my local high schools, I was shocked. It's like 25% black and 25% Hispanic. Where do these kids come from? The school is still doing pretty well by state standards, but I imagine it's not that far from tipping into dysfunction.
In certain neighborhoods in Dallas ISD, part of the benefit of accepting a housekeeping job is your employer lying to the schools about where your kids live- the school doesn’t care, these are mostly well behaved Hispanics whose parents believe in the Chancla, and if they show up to school, they get $9k on top of the property taxes from the sorts of houses that have full time housekeepers in Dallas. The kids get a better education. The employers get to throw in a fringe benefit practically for free. Their kids, of course, go to private schools, mostly Catholic or episcopal.
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If it's anything like my local school district, it's partly that people are choosing other education options (homeschool, private), and partly that people are having fewer kids and the youth demographics are different than the overall numbers. At least here, youth population is up (not even true everywhere), but district enrollment is down a lot.
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