It's easy to blame culture. It's kind of a thought terminating cliche. Once you've assigned blame to a general attitude among the public there nothing much to be done.

We could examine the common differences between US education and other high performing nations and try to reform towards something more effective, but really culture is the problem so let's all pack it up and find something else to worry about.

I think the one way that American culture does prevent progress is that Americans tend to be averse to evidence based reforms. They like to atomize responsibility for everything down to the individual. Homelessness, drug addiction, poor education outcomes, poor health outcomes, it's all just individuals making bad decisions or perpetuating bad culture.

If we did anything that actually helped it would somehow be condoning/encouraging the badness of these individuals. Regardless of how effective it would be it's somehow worse than allowing the problem to fester.