I saw some round table discussion about this once. I don’t remember any names, but one older black man on the panel, said he got a better education in the Jim Crow south, than the kids in inner cities get today.
And he suggested that values and discipline we’re what is lacking in schools today, not a lack of money.
I spent two years working as a claims rep for Social Security.
One guy who applied for retirement was a Black guy. He did not have a birth certificate so I had to check other records. One was the original form he filled out when he applied for a SSN.
One of the common records was early school records. He had gone to grammar school in Mississippi in the early 1900s. I sent off a request for his school records not really expecting much.
To my surprise they had really accurate and detailed records. This from an all Black school district in the middle of nowhere in Mississippi.
Thomas Sowell wrote a great piece about twenty-five years ago about how his niece got rejected to the college of her first choice and was upset.
“But, Uncle Tom (no I’m not making it up) I went to the same school you did and you were accepted by the better colleges.”
He went on to explain that the HS he graduated from in 1940 may have been the same building, but had become a shell of its former self by the time she graduated from in the ‘90’s.
In the NYC PS system back then, the ‘negro’ schools scored right there with the ‘white’ schools in district-wide scholastic competitions.