Is money really the issue? In many places, everybody gets a free education, and even university is free. So everybody could simply become a doctor or a lawyer and expect an income above the poverty line - at least if money was the only issue.
Of course, the number of new doctors per year is capped, so not everyone can be a doctor.
Even independent of educational quality, there is a world of difference between a school's ability to teach a well fed, comfortable child and a child whose only meal of the day is the free school lunch. Similarly, a rich child can afford to do unpaid internships on summer break, whereas a poor one may be working minimum wage jobs to generate an income instead.
This is before you get into the weeds of things like teachers preferring to be placed into good schools because it makes their jobs easier, that well-connected schools can raise money outside of the public system, etc. People say they want educational equality, but this is almost never at the perceived cost to their own children.
America spends the most in the world per capita on our schools and has terrible results. It's clear that tossing more money into a black hole won't fix the problem.
Anecdotally, in high school I never heard any white/Latino/black friend joke about getting yelled at if they got a B.
> unpaid internships
You might want to take a look at levels.fyi. Internship salaries are higher than a lot of full time jobs nowadays.
As an example, nearly all starting first-year internships in law are unpaid. People who don't take those will be competing with those that did do them the next year.
About the only place where you can reasonably say "we need more of these people" but is unpaid is legislative offices. And I agree, government should hire fewer but more highly paid and higher performing staff.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...
This seems like a child of recent immigrants thing more than Asian. Don’t 2nd and 3rd generation Asian perform on par with society at large?