I think that there is an excellent point here that "Incentives matter". Welfare is currently designed such that married couples or even co-habitating couples are punished and given less resources to succeed. Its unclear if that was an intentional attack on the black family unit or just an unfortunate consequence but the destruction of the poor black family is one of the main consequences of that policy. This could be easily fixed by removing the marriage penalty from all government programs and actually proving a small incentive for two people to stay toughener and raise a child. Just like incentives matter in welfare the do so in schools as well. There is no Incentive for good teachers to teach at poor schools, and no incentive for good students to go to said poor schools so anyone that can just gets out and goes somewhere better. Because of this, schools naturally segregate. If no effort is taken to integrate them over time schools will segregate into rich schools and poor schools which also tends to mean white/asian schools vs black/Hispanic schools due to how wealth is distributed demographicaly in the US. Its a self reinforcing loop where if a school is on an upward or downward trend it will continue on that trend until it either levels off at the top or sinks to the bottom.
Your point makes sense in regard to welfare, although to be honest I don't really know anything about it so take my agreement for what it's worth. I agree school segregation is a self reinforcing loop, because school segregation is both a cause and an effect of income inequality (via geographic segregation). But we could short that circuit if there were the political will to put resources into creating incentives for local governments (it's very expensive), teachers and parents. In the FY2017 Obama budget proposal, there was originally a $120 million grant program for integration, which was eventually reduced by 90% to $12 million. Now Devos might cut that in the name of "school choice" -- a dog whistle for de facto segregation. On the other hand, if we choose to follow political decisions (in this case, politically motivated legal decisions) like Miliken v Bradley and allow de facto segregation in schools, then we will never be able to have the equality of opportunity that would narrow the income and achievement gaps across races and prevent auto-segregation. Another thing to consider is why we can't appreciate the inherit incentives of school integration: It appears to do a whole lot of good for a lot of kids. Integration leads to higher achievement in several subjects, especially for black students. Based on the research I've seen, there is little to no effect on white students' performance. I don't know of any other pro-equality public policies that minimizes loses as much as integration does. As for the big picture, the potential knock-on effects of reducing systemic inequality should provide a lot of long-term incentive for white communities to embrace integration. It's not a panacea, but there are a lot of reasons to be (cautiously) optimistic about school integration. I think one, maybe not the only but at least one, reason we don't think about the inherit incentives of integration is that racism makes supporting integration politically toxic. Both white and black communities were widely opposed to integration in the 70s, and white families fought particularly hard to keep black students out of white schools. After that, white flight kicked in to avoid having to send white kids to predominately black schools.