Re throwing money at a problem and getting no results because of bad administration of funds---this is definitely what we have been doing in education and we should stop. Arguments to give more money to the same people to do the same things are going to go poorly with increasingly large amounts of the broader populace--this may not stop the government from doing it though.

I am not going to pretend to know the details of California school funding. But broadly speaking schools which get less local funding usually get more funding from state and federal sources. And the national average per pupil differences between the poorest and richest school districts are really not that large, but these numbers are very tricky (much more spent in nyc than idaho, etc.). Some anecdotes: recently there was a viral video of a school in Indiana, I think Carmel. Everyone was very impressed by the school facilities and it seemed to confirm the prior that rich kids get more funds. But then it turned out the average spending per pupil at that school is less than half the per pupil spending of DC public schools. Now there may be good reasons DC would spend more (COL etc.), but even adjusting for that the spending wouldn't be that different. Carmel just spends the money better. Anecdote 2: I have taught school in rural areas at schools which are absolutely poor in terms of facilities and everything else. I don't think tripling the spending per student would have done anything at all to change outcomes there...the students could usually not make it through a 40 min lesson without attacking each other or totally disrupting things. No reasonable amount of money would have changed this. It is not that expensive to educate a kid, you just need to feed them and teach them things that have been known for hundreds or thousands of years from old books. What is going wrong, I think, does not have to do with differences in school funding.

I think Obama's legacy is yet to be understood. Something like "the inspirational power of the symbol of a black president" is difficult to measure. The worsening race relations and their societal impacts (and their causes) since he took office is also hard to measure. Im curious what your evidence is to say "it seems very important for inspiring US blacks in general". Inspiring them to do what? And how is this quantified? (I guess by asking people "who is your hero" or something).