No Child Left Behind blamed Black students for funding inequities while cutting their funding

Evidence

The bill professed that its purpose was to keep children from being left behind, but it simultaneously encouraged funding mechanisms that decrease funding to schools when students are not making improvements, thus leaving the neediest students behind. The No Child Left Behind Act was not supposed to make sense. It was the latest and greatest mechanism for placing the blame for funding inequities on Black children, teachers, parents, and public schools. And this victim blaming watered the growth of the quickening “No Excuses” charter school movement, which ordered children to rise above their difficult circumstances, and blamed (and expelled) these children if they could not. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1186

Categorization

• XREF: A textbook case of Kendi’s causal inversion: self-interested policy (funding that punishes low performers) produces the victim-blaming ‘No Excuses’ ideology. Directly testable instance of the pattern the reader is studying.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the mechanism of ‘funding decreases when students don’t improve’ — how exactly does that operate institutionally, and who profits?