The most important thing money can buy is more teachers. I went to chicago public schools. In my elementary school each class had 32+ students and 1 teacher. I was accepted to a gifted high school which had very successful fundraising campaigns. That allowed the school to hire extra teachers, lowering the class sizes to ~25. Meanwhile private schools have class sizes < 20. It makes a huge difference. When there are 32 kids in a class there is 0 individual attention.