Culture comes from both the family and the people around them. Educational intervention isn't of much use if the parents don't care about education.
That's so untrue as confirmed by MANY examples in US history ALONE that I cannot believe that even you have the gall to type that out.
Of course, children do best when parental influences and societal ones converge to promote education.
As to 'many decades and billions of dollars spent on educational intervention with little effect?' Equally ignorant and bigoted and utterly unsupported by facts.
Unless you mean that we still have poor among us and uneducated among us. Or unless you are referring to the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on the Trump family's education alone which has given us a powerful yet exceedingly ignorant and ill educated oligarch who is attempting to foist his dynasty on the world, bringing in more directly bloodthirsty dictators to achieve his goals which extend only to personal enrichment.
Then, you'd be exactly right.