A good friend has branded US public schools as failure factories that turn out barely literate kids by the thousands.
This has been known for quite some time, decades.
“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”
— Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education
A Nation at Risk: The Imperative For Educational Reform, 1983
https://www2.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/risk.html
I don’t believe things have materially improved since 1983. I would love to be shown to be wrong.