For people not from the US, selective defunding of education was part of a strategy begun in the mid-1800s to further disenfranchise free blacks around the nation.
By shifting schools to local funded, areas with multiple (segregated) school systems used "plain and simple economic reason" to shut down excess schools to save cost, somehow always the black ones. The proof that blacks could not lift themselves out of these situations was used as further proof of their inherent inferiority, not the systemic racism they faced.
To compound this, states that organized "literacy tests"[1] to vote rarely required them for whites. Further removed from the ability to affect their circumstances, many black communities languished for generations.
As a natural extension of this, many school districts in the US are still operating under unequal resources while their constituents' tax revenues go towards the landscaping and infrastructure costs of wealthier areas, while the blame is placed on the victims (eg- "absent parents" who are largely working class victims of exploitation from extreme rent seeking, over-policing harsher monetary and legal penalties, payday loan traps, and other things you don't encounter in wealthy areas).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test