This is such a good thread to thread. . .it will take me a while to finish it.
Personally, my high school education was awesome.
Education:
Some of the classes I had in hs, they were probably more useful than most of the classes I took in college, and I go to a really good college. I feel that it is because the students in my classes had a deep passion to learn, and my teachers had a deep passion to pass on their wisdom. I can write pages on the stuff I learned in hs, the fundamentals of: communication, writing, analytical thinking, scientific approach. But, none of that required any money. You could put us all in a dumpster, and we all would still learn great things.
All we need for a good education is students who have a passion for success and teachers who have a passion to teach. The main reason why the students had a passion for learning is the high standards their parents put for them.
Of course, there were many other factors that could have also contributed to the success of our students. Similar how google gives their employee's lots of benefits so they can be happy and therefore very productive (
http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/static.py?page=benefits.html), our school did a lot of things for us to be happy. We had: good looking modern buildings, decently funded sports, a variety of extracurricular classes and clubs, modern text books, and good computers. But, these factors are not the core reason why some kids do better than others, otherwise no kids from the ghettos would ever make it to college, but there is a good amount who did make it over here. It is because those kids worked hard.
But even with all the passion in the world, but are some factors they could not over come. Many of the people who came from disadvantages backgrounds eventually quit the engineering program I am in. That is because they did not have the science and mathematical intuition to get through the classes. I am not talking about science and mathematical material, but the intuition that can only be developed through studying hard and advanced mathematical and scientific concepts. Two people may know calculus, but if one took a very hard calculus class and the other took a very easy one, the one who took the hard one would have the abilities to learn more advanced engineering concepts even if they have nothing to do with calculus.
Sorry, all I have written is a bunch of random rambling, I just their education, but the real heart of one's educations depends on how hard he/she works on it.