Agreed, I believe its success can potentially be replicated to some degree, but not its particular formula. I left a few thoughts on that in a follow-up comment below, but fundamentally my thinking is that comprehensive well-designed integration of AI throughout the system could allow schools to move toward leaner administrations with smaller numbers of higher-quality better-compensated teachers. Furthermore, technology like Waymo's could potentially make it viable to shuttle larger numbers of students to a smaller number of higher-quality schools.

I'm also optimistic that physical goods as a whole will become much more affordable over the next decade or two for various reasons, which would further enable the median public school to approach the level of 00s MHS without relying on local concentration of a disproportionate share of national wealth.

All that being said, my point wasn't "look how well-funded my high school was". Regardless of the reasons, it's a bright spot in a narrative of doom and gloom. Only the horror stories seem to get any attention, and if you listen to anyone with strong political views on the topic you'd think each state's governing party had turned its entire school system into a network of indoctrination camps. It's also clearly the case based on my disturbingly bad elementary school experience, and from what I've heard of some other local schools that should have comparable financing to MHS, that money isn't sufficient to provide a top-tier educational experience.

I think it's important to look at schools and counties that perform well and carefully evaluate which elements can be used as a model to help improve public education as a whole, rather than assuming that absolutely nothing is replicable without gobs of cash. For example, off the top of my head, what if the federal government provided an annual budget for a handful of top-ranking districts across the country to have their best teachers of different subjects at each grade level oversee production and maintenance of open source course materials, video lectures, and possibly LLM chatbots? What if teachers all had some equivalent of GitHub to share and collaborate on that stuff? It wouldn't fix problems like rundown facilities or availability of computers and textbooks, but it would allow the worst Latin teacher in the country to provide something a lot closer to the Mr. Bigger experience, and that's just one idea.