modern america's education pipeline is seriously corrupted and was corrupted on purpose to prevent social classes (ie, Whites, Asians, Jews) from excelling. Most of this stems from the 10's postmodernism and what should be called the "woke" affect, where white people, rather than allow meritocracy and education flourish, filled these classrooms with unqualified students, ruining the public asset for fear of being called racist.

Instead of allowing races and women into the public benefits sphere, they slowly dismantled the social safetynet.

In the specific instance for education, pushing state funding onto the state income taxes and school districts ensured rich areas would continue to fund impoverished schools and as the decades wore on, this ballooning of budgets bled into it's surroundings and then the dismantling of merit as per-head attendence started via magnet, charter schools and now school voucher programs for private schools and the rest.

This is a pipeline designed to punish society for perceived racism. this is "critical race theory" in the next 5 decades.

You can blame it on leftist culture, but that's just the indirect cause of fundamentally desociallizing/devaluing public assets. You can make a direct association, also, with the rise of the DEI class as another attack on normalzing this type of segregation without laws.