I support deep cuts in public education funding to fund vouchers for school choice. I'm a left-leaning nerd, and my own personal experiences with public schools as a student and then as a parent have lead me to the conclusion that public schools are dealing with the same issues that General Motors dealt with in the 80's and 90's when trying to reform into a Lean production model:
They unionized while engaging in a model that worked for their respective time periods, and the unions interests don't allow for massive structural changes. Public schools worked very well when intelligent, educated women had almost zero career options other than teaching. They established pay structures that reward length of tenure over any other measures.
An immediate red flag for any institution is a persecution of innovators. This is a common occurrence in public school systems.
I grew up in a poor, rural public school system. Co-workers of mine who are 10 years older learned to program in the public schools they attended in wealthy suburbs. My schools were too busy focusing on teaching the 90% of students who they knew weren't going to college how to work on cars to worry about paying for a computer lab.
Had we had vouchers available to us, we would have done what we had begged the school board to do: create a small computer lab for the handful of students who were decent at math, and then pay the fee for the satellite TV learning program used by other rural schools. But no, they were driven by political demands to instead fund bullshit like trips for the chorus class to competitions.
I finally lost patience with the public schools my son attended last year, and put him in private school. The public school system here had decided that teaching cursive writing was not important, and completely removed it from the curriculum. As a result, my son had to learn cursive in 6th grade at his private school. He learned it in a few weeks of practice at home and while doing his normal course work. Ask yourself what kind of institution decides that cursive is no longer necessary and ensures that the kids won't be able to write a signature when they graduate? I think they did it because choosing to no longer teach something is a quick win.
Additionally, my son's coursework is much, much harder than it was previously. He's actually challenged by his classes now. I was lucky enough to have money to choose his school. His classmates weren't.