What would be the fix towards raising the standards?
Is this a funding issue or a class issue or...?
Fix the funding issues, step up the qualifications standards for teachers and pay according to the newer, higher standard, adopt a mastery model to the classroom (a la the Shanghai method). That's it. It could be shortened to "Prioritize educating everyone, not rewarding the most resourced." If we did the first half, we'd find the best students regardless of parental resources.
Essentially, we have an education system that is geared towards the most resourced. More resourced communities get newer buildings, better qualified teachers, etc. But those communities also spend a significant amount of money outside of the classroom to reinforce and advance the education their kids are receiving. This means that the most resourced accrue greater educational rewards because of the resources, not the core ability.
We see this in sports as well. Take 2 kids with equal potential to be MLB pitchers. They both play Little League. One kid has a coach who played pro ball, the other kid has a coach who only played college ball. The difference in knowledge is going to have an impact. But that's not where it really matters. The kid with the pro coach - his parents are paying for a private pitching coach every week. The other kid is practicing with his dad who never played baseball as a kid. They're spending the same amount of hours practicing pitching but one kid is getting far better instruction as a result of having better resources to tap into.
Our education system works in a very similar way. The resource gap shows up in teacher qualification, school quality (labs, libraries), etc. Things that might get missed if people only look at total dollar spend.
I've become a fan of the Shanghai mastery model because I think it makes some effort to bypass this resource problem. In the Shanghai mastery model, the classroom doesn't move to a new concept until everyone in the classroom grasps the concept. Applied from kindergarten age onward, it minimizes situations where kids fall behind the classroom and then are dependent on their parents to shore up their education. Which works fine when the parents know the child is falling behind and have the resources to intervene. But at the younger ages like kindergarten and 1st grade, most parents don't know which concepts are supposed to be mastered vs. which ones are still developing.
Our model should apply mastery to the entire classroom, rather that identifying which kids are already ahead of the curve and trying to push them further ahead. Now, I have nothing against gifted education -- I think it's important. But educating the entire population is different from id'ing the gifted and requires a different set of criteria and a different approach to meet those criteria. As the parent of a profoundly gifted kid, a common complaint about gifted education is that it's not really geared towards gifted kids. It's the basic education that every kid should be getting but because the education system is so bad, we only provide it to the "gifted". Which works for the moderately gifted but does pretty much nothing for the exceptionally and profoundly gifted.
So neither cohort gets what they need. The regular students get a subpar experience. The exceptionally gifted all get a subpar experience. And parents are forced to spend personal resources to ensure that thier kids get an appropriate education. Which makes it a resource driven environment, not an education driven one.
My $0.02