By law, a forced captive audience with no other alternatives and administrators and higher ups in be bureaucratic chain are then free to experiment on the children with different mind control and social engineering techniques all the while pushing the liberal agenda.
Tools of the mind was a technique that failed miserably at my wife's school and left first graders way behind and cost the district hundreds of thousand of dollars. No apologies nor postmortems, they simply moved on to the next “program.”
Another program is investigations math.
Bottom line: what makes the difference are involved parents.