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American public school students from wealthy districts generate some of the best test scores in the world. This proves that the education system’s problems are not universal — the crisis is isolated primarily in the parts of the system that operate in high poverty very high Democrat areas.
Specifically, it is "isolated primarily” to places where parental support for disciplined learning by the children is in short supply.

You want to see evidence of a crisis in education? Well, a “crisis” is a point of danger and opportunity. And here is one:
khanacademy.org
For the teachers’ union, it is danger; I showed that site to a math teacher, and she walked away from my computer saying that suddenly her job didn’t seem as secure as it had the moment before.
For any parent, any child, and any adult who feels a need to learn, that site is an opportunity. And of course, that’s just one site. If one man can build a site like that, someone else can try to do it better - and just as free. But Salman Khan is one sharp cookie, and a man who oozes empathy for the student. So anyone who does better will have to be pretty good themselves.
The idea that geometrically increasing funding from the government is sine qua non for the education of our children, to the extent that it ever was actually based in facts and logic, is now as musty, archaic and stodgy, as the conceit that we needed boards dominated by unions to determine whether to build diesel-electric or steam locomotives.
Yes, I found an old socialist tract that argued exactly that! And laughed, not at the controversy that once raged over the replacement of the steam locomotive, but at the notion that that was even an important question at a point in time in which aviation was about to supplant long-distance rail passenger service - and computers were about to supplant aviation as the frontier of technology!
The lesson is obvious -technologically speaking, unions are inherently reactionary.

In the Houston-Clear Lake area (property tax state of Texas) the “wealthy” school districts must increase what they tax themselves for their schools (just to keep current) as there is something called the “Robin Hood” fund that steals (re-directs) taxpayer money from “rich” school coffers to give to the “poor” school districts (Shelia Jackson-Lee, etc. areas).