The best solution I can think of is to pay children to succeed in academics or extracurriculars (STEM, clubs, sports, arts, etc.) A student wouldn't have to be gifted in math, just apply themselves to some interest that drives them.
Give them a score-based percentage of $200/mo for hitting certain criteria each month. Playing for the school sports team, being in the band, getting involved in photography. Something positive in academics, arts, leadership, cooperation.
Paying kids would teach valuable lessons about finance and build up a reward system that would serve them later in life as they begin to associate action and achievement with positive outcomes. It should still work even if they don't have a suitable environment at home to discover this on their own.
Right now school is basically daycare. It can teach those that are properly prepared at home to pay attention, but it fails so many others.
Therein lines the problem.
Pay people enough $ and they'll go to the gym and get in shape, but once the $ stops they'll almost universally stop going.
Take people who have a regular gym habit, start paying them, stop paying them and most of them will stop going to the gym, adding in the extrinsic motivation will actually destroy the intrinsic motivation (and pleasure!) they once had around the activity.
With enough extrinsic only motivators, people stop feeling any actual joy in life, everything becomes a fight for an external reward.
The home environment also contributes a great deal to academic success or failure. I know of households that actively dissuade kids from pursuing academic success. If parents won't intervene in their children's education for any reason that diminishes their chance of success.
Honestly, it is part of the social contract that the government, or at least society, needs to maintain.
If you look at cultures where education is valued, where academic achievement is high, there is a very strong social contract in place that equates academic success to success later in life. China has had national exams for over a thousand years, with the same promise: Anyone who does well in school and succeeds can have their station in life elevated by doing well in school.
Rich or poor, rural or urban, everyone (or at least a large swath of people) in China has traditionally had this guarantee lying around.
Do good in school, and you will be taken care of after that. You can get a good spouse, a good job, and life will get easier.
America has actively worked to break such promises. Historically when a minority community worked together and excelled, their houses and businesses got literally burned down to the ground, or sometimes, less violently, just taken away from them.
That teaches a lesson right there, "work hard, and fuck you".
Rather recently, middle class white students in America studied hard only to find the social contract involved universities jacking up tuition fees to sky high levels, loading them down with tons of debt, and then leaving school for crap jobs and a life of constant interest payments.
A shit ton better than being burned out of your house, but it still shows how American society is willing to tear up social contracts so that powerful institutions can earn some extra $$$.
Housing then folds into this, it used to be American cities worked hard to expand the housing supply, they eagerly courted young families, now cities are actively hostile to anyone new coming to town.
But the fact is, maintaining that social contract pays for itself many times over with social stability, a lesson America has apparently forgotten.
Some parts of the government get this, some types of inefficient contracts (build/buy American) are in fact job creation programs, but we need to do a lot better.
Build more housing, a ton more, and force state universities to have much lower tuition by removing the obscene overhead. I rarely advocate for "just cut funding and make people figure it out", but honestly, pass a law saying State Universities aren't allowed to cut any faculty positions, then demand they cut tuition by 50%, and have their new budgets independently audited. Sure the student swimming pool may get shut down, but too bad.
Yes, let's embed the fundamentals of wage-slavery at even younger ages.
I definitely agree with this
>>> Give them a score-based percentage of $200/mo for hitting certain criteria each month.
I would love if this would work, but unfortunately there is no easy answer. In fact, MacArthur Genius Award Winner and John Bates Clark medalist Roland Fryer managed to somehow persuade entire school districts to test your very assertion at scale, and the results were not straightforward as you seem to believe [1]
Incentives dont quite work like you expect them ...
[1] https://www.econtalk.org/roland-fryer-on-educational-reform/
We're in East Renton, which usually follows Seattle, but they have kept honor courses. In fact, honor courses are encouraged to take, open to everyone, and from what I understand, no one is rejected (possibly only for the first year). I like this approach better than 'algebra for no one'.
Yes, the better school districts are east of Seattle, and this is why all those homes are retaining their skyrocketing value.
>> Asking higher income parents to risk their children's future is a lot.
We're not wealthy at all, so if the Renton school system follows Seattle, we're not going to waste our child's future on crap education.