Certainly. Correlation isn't causation. One hurdle is that any experimental study of this phenomenon would be highly unethical.
Not always. It might be possible that there are orphanage systems where children are randomly assigned to either orphanage A or orphanage B. If you go to Africa to set up such a system you can add special funding to one of the two orphanages to raise it's quality much higher than that of the average African orphanage.
You can also split test different educational philosophies that way.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.