This is going to sound a bit Machiavellian, I'm surprised that the fear of failure has not been brought up as a strong motivator. I'm assuming the selection bia

This is going to sound a bit Machiavellian, I'm surprised that the fear of failure has not been brought up as a strong motivator. I'm assuming the selection bias in the movie shows hard working impoverished children who want to do better in school-- but are they not motivated when they consider the alternatives? My wife works at the best school in the county (not country!). If a student fails a single test, she is told that the kid will be sat down after school, retaught the course work, and be given the test a 2nd time. Any student with a learning disability on record (including ADHD) is all but exempt from any standards set by the teacher. Furthermore, teachers are encouraged to "round up" to look better for the school district. If a student fails a class, they will spend time in front of a computer for 3 weeks to make up the credit. If a student fails to have enough credits before graduation, they will still let you walk the stage and you can simply come back during the summer to sit in front of a computer. There's no social stigma of failure in the school's culture anymore, and that also comes from the family life (the F from jamwt's post). The student could care less about grades because the parents don't care and they will just have them work at the shop after high school. This carries on with the teachers. Tenure is a very dangerous asset that a teacher can have, and it keeps the bad teachers in. Students will come into my wife's English class without a basic knowledge of sentence structure and many other things that ought to have been known by this age, and the grade level below her shows videos for a very large amount of time. They will read 1/4 of Romeo and Juliet and just watch the rest on TV without any analysis of the material. This is a social and political system in which individual failure has been discouraged, removed, and subsidized. While positive reinforcements (good grades, more money after graduation) can certainly help, the fact that the lack of hard work can be shrugged off so easily has to be a component of school under-performance.