Of course, parental involvement is itself generally a factor of money, so once again your point makes no sense.
Is there a direct correlation statistically with income and school performance? To lazy to look it up now.
In a word:
Yes.
The achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families is roughly 30 to 40 percent larger among children born in 2001 than among those born twenty-five years earlier. In fact, it appears that the income achievement gap has been growing for at least fifty years, though the data are less certain for cohorts of children born before 1970. In this chapter, I describe and discuss these trends in some detail. In addition to the key finding that the income achievement gap appears to have widened substantially, there are a number of other important findings.
Americans tend to underestimate the rather tight linkage between issues of geography, family income, educational attainment, and your own future income and mobility. In essence, if you come from a poor family in a poor area and attend school in a poor district, the deck is stacked overwhelmingly against you. Your odds of high educational attainment are very low. Now, maybe you're lucky. Maybe you were born with an unusually high intelligence, and maybe one of your teachers in that poor school noticed it and fought to get you more resources so you could live up to your potential, and so maybe you'll get good grades because you have a supportive environment at home and at school and eventually win scholarships to a prestigious university which lead you down a path to a PhD and a lofty position making over $100K a year as a top researcher.
But most people are not that lucky. Most kids in such a situation will just grind through the school system with parents too poor, too overworked, and too uneducated themselves to be much help. The average student--being average--will probably face indifferent teachers and limited prospects. Poor educational attainment and job and wage insecurity will be constant problems for many.
Contrast this with being, say, a rather average child of a wealthier family. Though you may not be very smart, they can get you tutors, and you're already going to a better school, and if your family is wealthy they are probably connected, too. They can pull some strings and get you in where Mom or Dad went to college, and they're paying your way, too. So, this average person ends up achieving much more highly than they would have otherwise, due to the advantages of their birth.
The answer is not, I think, to begrudge those advantages, but to recognize that they exist and do our best to offer similar advantages to those who weren't simply born into them. There are actually two big sides to that: first, have a social infrastructure in place where the parents can actually
be more available and attentive, where they don't have to work multiple jobs just to scrape by; second, fund underperforming schools better and put more effort toward attracting better quality talent. Instead of focusing on either of those, we've denigrated them. People who take government handouts are leeches, and teachers are selfish miscreants who unionized to suck taxpayer coffers dry and give no shits about the children they (supposedly) fail over and over to educate. These memes are incredibly damaging and do no favors to improving any of this. They're really just a form of class warfare waged by the wealthy against the poor and working class.
Essentially, Americans like to believe we live in a nearly-pure meritocracy, when the reality is that most of what you will be able to accomplish in life comes down to luck, particularly what sort of parents you happened to be born to, and what their circumstances were like during the course of your childhood.
