From my direct experience working in this field for over ten years, parent's attitude and social environment probably account for most of the variation in educa

From my direct experience working in this field for over ten years, parent's attitude and social environment probably account for most of the variation in education achievement at the elementary level. Kids are curious by nature, but acquiring the three Rs (reading, writing, arithmetic) is not built into human nature. It requires sufficient cultural support from the kid's environment and caretakers. Dedicated teachers and good learning process help, but children spend much more time at home and in their neighborhood than at school. Another factor, not very politically correct to say but real nonetheless, is genetics, although genes likely play a larger role when the subject matter is more complicated, at the high school level and beyond, and when the learning environment is worse. If the teaching system is suitable and children have the motivation to learn, most students can master elementary school materials quite well. At the high school level though, not everyone can master abstract concepts, like equations involving complex numbers and trigonometric functions, with reasonable effort, especially if their basics from elementary education are lacking. (They may be able to get fairly good at them with Herculean efforts, but few would want to dedicate their whole teenage life to academics.) Given the hypothesis from real-world experience above, I suspect that reform successes at the high school level is significantly harder to come by than at the elementary one. If anyone has empirical data to support or refute this hypothesis, it would be helpful. In any case, involving parents and caretakers to support children education is essential for any school reform efforts in poorer neighborhood. This is likely to be more effective at the elementary level when parents have stronger influence over their kids, and other confounding factors (like drugs and love life) are less important than when they become teens. Parental push is definitely behind the academic success of Confucius regions in Asia: Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and Shanghai-China. All of them perform excellently in international academic assessments in reading, math, and science. http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/dec/03/pisa-results-country-best-reading-maths-science http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/dec/03/pisa-re... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trends_in_International_Mathematics_and_Science_Study#Top_10_countries_by_subject_and_year http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trends_in_International_Mathema...