>>14272518Good and bad schools aren't a meme, and neither is funding. The problem is that every factor is cumulative and also not weighted identically. The heaviest weighted factor that no one wants to address (because it's virtually impossible to address) is student motivation.
A motivated student who believes or knows the education is valuable and believes they are being bettered by their studies will do great in any environment they find themselves in. The exact opposite is true for unmotivated students - they will fail, no matter where you put them.
If you could possibly equalize student motivation (you cannot), then yes - absolutely - the motivated students at a better funded school with newer material, better technology, more extracurricular programs, etc. will have greater achievement than motivated students at a school with less of all of that. That should be immediately obvious.
The real problem is, then, the motivation of the students. Motivation is affected by many, many factors, a lot of which are not under any individual's control, including the student's. We haven't figured out a sure-fire way to motivate every person in every situation in nearly 6,000 years of recorded history. So, you (by which I mean, the government/administrative bodies) control known factors that affect motivation. In education, the part that is controllable is the quality of the schools. You can't even control motivation of the staff, anymore than you can control motivation of the students. The only thing you can control is how new the material is, how modern the infrastructure, how available and modernized the technology is, how much people are getting paid, amount of extracurricular activities, etc. None of these things are memes, and while their effects are limited compared to motivation, you have to try to control for them where you can, if you want the highest quality students.
