Newer does not mean better, or even imply it. Money spent on facilities has almost no correlation to educational outcomes.

What matters are the peers you go to school with, supported by decent curriculum and moderately competent teachers. None of which is expensive. Oh, and administrators who actually care about teaching being done vs. being terrified of the lawsuit fairy.

It’s the peers that matter by far the most - and that means parents. Parents that are self-selecting into good districts tend to skew heavily towards “involved” and some definition of functional. This can mean being able to and buying a home or rent an apartment in a good district, or finding some clever and/or creative workaround to get the same outcome. The latter is even better in most cases since those families are motivated at an even higher level to make sure it’s a success.

The best school I went to as a kid was a private highly selective school in “the ghetto” where my dad lived growing up. Nearly every kid there was on some form of subsidized or full ride tuition, with very “working class” parents. The facilities were barebones at best. The vast majority of kids had parents who held them to extreme expectations even if they didn’t have financial means or even time to be highly involved day to day.

The uber rich brand new high school I went to the next year in the suburbs wasn’t even close.

The difference was in the kids who attended the school and the expectations put on them for both classroom behavior, engagement, and work ethic. Shitty disruptive kids were kicked out within a matter of days so as to let kids who wanted to be there actually learn.

Anything beyond that is close to a rounding error for outcomes.

The inner city school district I pay taxes into spends more per student than many of the suburbs. You could triple it again and get zero change in outcomes - in fact so far since living here school budgets are inversely correlated with outcome, although I don’t see a causation there in either direction.

Schools that are allowed to be ran like schools and hold students to high expectations and standards do well. Schools that are ran like social programs trying to correct for all of societies ills do not. It’s pretty simple in the end.

How do you not run a public school that is charged with serving all students in its district as a social program?