This is actually why a lot of public schools are so poorly funded now. Back in the civil rights era, white families who could afford it sent their kids to private schools after desegregation, where their schools could still be segregated (because they didn’t receive federal funds). The white people who couldn’t send their kids off to private or religious schools decided that “if we have to share space with black folk, we’ll just drag our formerly-white schools down to the level that black schools were at”. Cue a generation or two growing up with poorly-funded schools and it turns rapidly into a tradition - “we’ve always had low taxes from the school district, why do we need to increase it half a mill”.