We have materialist-behaviorist schooling that teaches people to assume secular premises, become habituated to them, and play them out in the school environment (which is simply a model of the society-at-large). OTOH, Religion with a capital "R" is out the door.
School is the dream-child of egoists who fell prey to the secularist temptation to see everything around us as a staging ground for our own, this-worldly ambitions. Thus, school has tremendous misguided, egotistical ambition driving it.
The great temptation for us is to jump aboard the secularist bandwagon - to "find a way to make the schools better." What that means is to stay wedded to the secularist dream even if the good things around us need to be destroyed in the pursuit thereof.
I think you’re correct about the “jumping on the bandwagon” warning. There’s no re-energizing a failed social program. The public school system must have a competitor for the whole to improve. Public schools have no competing education institutions or teachers’ unions to motivate it to improve. Simply have multiple competitors will stir up the market. Also, teaching unions must not be allowed to fix prices similar to how all businesses must compete in an open and free market. Multiple conservative states will have to initiate competing teacher’s unions at the same time the same way Pro-Lifers must fight abortion on as many fronts as possible. This keeps the monopolizing thugs from fixing and defeating families on solitiary battlefields the same way that pro-abortion forces can’t engage in multiple courts (dead babies aren’t popular enough to sustain abortion money in multiple courts and for multiple pro-abort candidates). Grassroots action overcomes this dragon.