Don't you think that children of Baltimore deserve accountability from Baltimore politicians? Who runs these schools? Republicans in Texas?
Nope. Education is such a complex and critical task that letting local politicians to decide the fate of our children in the hyper competitive 21st century is borderline insane.
>Who runs these schools? Republicans in Texas?
That's complete strawman. Most countries have non-partisan experts (i,e non-politicians) in charge of education. Just because everything is politicized and hyper-partisan in this broken country doesn't mean it's the only way going forward.
Local control does not have to imply local funding.
The funding system can migrate to the state level (I find it hard to imagine that the states would agree to an explicit federal level funding system). The control (i.e. how the money gets spent) can remain (substantially) local.
What is objectionable about the current US version of "local based education" is that the funding for it depends to a very large extent on local property taxes. Have the misfortune to be a school student in a poor area, and you will probably get a worse education than someone with the good fortune to be a student in a wealthy area.
One clear thing that has happened is every student is getting a lot of money spent on them! (~$19k). Spending has increased substantially. There is a lot of waste. Despite losing 30% of students since that time period due to demographics, the number of teachers has actually increased. Staff to student ratio is 1:4.
But performance has not changed, and has actually gone down a bit if you squint at the numbers.