This statement above implies that at one time government socialist-entitlement K-12 schools were functional. They weren't. They were EVIL from the beginning! Your statement implies that if we could go back to some magical date the government's socialist-entitlement schools could be reformed and fixed.
Government socialist-entitlement schooling was and is just as evil as Obamacare will be.
***Socialist-entitlement K-12 schooling was a Prog idea from the beginning. ***The Progs have always had control of teacher training and curriculum development.
** The Progs have always promoted socialism, fascism, and communism.
***The Progs have consistently from the beginning pushed God out of the classroom and promoted secularism and godlessness.
**The Progs have always worshiped the golden calf of government control.
***The Progs have always pushed at the edges of societal morals and ethics.
Since the introduction of compulsory attendance at our nation's socialist-entitlement K-12 schools literacy in the U.S. has steadily **declined**! And...It only took one to three generations of socialist-entitlement K-12 schooling to give the nation Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Ironically, liberals send their kids to private schools to avoid the kind of public school violence they believe doesn’t exist.
The government schools were never great but at one time they did tend to reflect local community standards. And they did teach actual academic subjects. And they taught some actual history. The education I got in 3 years in an American private school in Istanbul- grades 2-4- left me far in advance of the kids in school in the USA after that. But the education I got through High School was so far superior to anything available in public schools now as to be on a different planet. In Florida the schools were always 10 years behind the northern schools. That meant that they were academically inferior to those northern schools until the mid to late 80s. Until the late 90s it meant that the Fla schools were academically on a par with or superior to the northern schools and were not so infected with the mindless liberalism. Now they are all totally useless except as propaganda mills and day prisons.