But that's not our current style of failure, it's "hey poor district, you're not up to snuff compared to the rich district. We're going to fire all the teachers, gut your union, and generally make your life hell. That's sure to make you do better".
I have worked in a poorly funded chicago public school that had just that year become a "turnaround school". That's just a very cute euphemism for "we fired everyone, hired whatever assholes would work for the least amount of money (Yo!), more or less eliminated any budgets you would be working with, and are making no other real changes". I guess the logic is that if we were going to be set up for failure, we might as well do it on the cheap.
Then, a few years later, they wonder why the students who went to those schools are so far behind the rest of the students in the city.
I should also mention that many of the students going to these schools were already saddled with the disadvantages of being poor and black in Chicago, before having their entire educational world replaced with an even shittier and more dysfunctional one.
The funny thing is that I agree with both your cynicism in practice, and the parent commenter's optimism in theory.
This is not the time to be worried about fairness. This is the time to figure out what works. When you have that, then worry about fairness. Demanding that all the experiments be done equally to everybody at scale produces total paralysis, and is in no small part responsible for the total paralysis we witness in school reformation right now. You simply can't do anything that way.