If you say 'educated qualified teachers aren't allowed to teach and we are spending the whole budget on grok tokens' you can spend money on education without improving outcomes. This is true.

But generally, if you pay for teachers facilities and things like textbooks chosen by people who know the subjects, you get better outcomes literally as far as any society in history has ever tried.

There's also some peripheral stuff like nutrition programs, enrichments like field trips, fancy org design shit and tech toys that are good when done in good faith and can provide really exceptional returns but can go off-mission in various ways that don't improve educational outcomes as much, where returns do not scale to an unlimited degree, or shit can be applied in a detrimental way. This is why a hypothetical competent administrator would be very useful, though I'm more likely to have an opportunity to be gangbanged by unicorns than ever meet one of those who works around education.