Public schools are designed to provide a basic education necessary to operate machinery in the local mills and factories.
Guess what?
There are NO local mills and factories any more. The education of the modern jobs can’t be done by the teachers we have. Nor, is every person “capable” of learning and applying that education.
They were designed for that; at this point they are designed to simply transfer wealth through the teachers’ unions to the Democratic Party. If your children aren’t in “honors classes” (newspeak for the only classes where any learning takes place - about on par with regular classes thirty years ago), then they aren’t getting any education at all. My children have foreign math & science teachers because there are no American teachers that know those subjects (they prefer easier material that has less-obvious performance metrics), and the American teachers will offer increases in grades for cans of food brought in for food drives.