One room school houses with no more “resources” than desks, a blackboard, a wood burning stove, and a small library of standard texts used to produce a public that could read, cipher, and knew its own history. The problem is not some lack of resources it is a whirling mass that contains unionized incompetent teachers and a home and community culture which over generations has come to not just tolerate criminality and ignorance but glorify it.
The results of a school system have almost NOTHING to do with how much money is spent, as long as the rooms are warm in the winter, the toilets work and the roof doesn’t leak. It’s the quality of the people in it and the support structures of the student families. I saw the figures comparing my Catholic high school to the local public school when I was a student there, and, in this measure, the Catholic school was actually laughable. Not so funny were the results of the public school’s student performance in comparison - and that was 40 years ago.
You got that right!
The school is not responsible for the educational failures of the children. The teachers may not be helpful and may be counterproductive, but they ultimately are not responsible for the failure of the children to acquire an education. The parents bear the burden of making sure their children gain a proper education, but they are not the parents cannot be the ultimate reason for the failure of the children to gain an education. There is only one party who ultimately responsible for the failure to gain an education, and that party is each and every individual child. Any person, child or adult, can gain an education by taking the time and trouble to teach themselves by any and every means available around them. Only the disabled have any sort of excuse for not having a basic education and proficiency in the fundamental skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Everything else is a false excuse. If anything, schools and school teachers are too often an impediment to gaining an education, because they monopolize the time of the children who would be better off teaching themselves and each other using books, videos, and computers to read and perform mathematics. The time is long overdue when the children, parents, and teachers are held personally responsible for their own performances and failures to perform.
Well, that's true. Those schools were better, and more students would be helped if they came back. BUT NOT ALL.
That is the key to the education wars. MANY STUDENTS CANNOT AND SHOULD NOT GO BEYOND EIGHTH GRADE.
Since both "sides" in the education debates cannot accept this obvious, fundamental truth, failure is baked in.
If the excellent public schools of 1900-1960 were given the mandate to educate all persons born or residing in the United States to the academic twelfth grade level, and then to send virtually all of them into baccalaureate programs, the system you (and I) so admire would have collapsed in short order.
You say that one room school houses used to produce "a public that could…" The white high school graduation rate in 1941 was 25%. Say another 10% had to drop out because of dire financial circumstances, so that 65% of the departures were voluntary.
That's about where we are today, except that we have built massive detention centers where the 65% of the white population that has no interest and lacks the ability to complete a twelve-year academic program are detained until they are 18.
It can't work, it is not working, and it isn't going to work.
Compared to the existential impossibility of it all, the teacher's unions and all the other epiphenomena of modern US public education matter not at all.
Oh, one more thing. The 35% or so of the white population that CAN achieve twelfth-grade level work are not being educated properly because of the challenges of running these detention centers.