We start with 50 different school curriculums, even though 2+2=4, and CAT spells Cat in every state in the union. That's bad enough, but then those schools are treated differently depending on which neighborhood they serve.
So the biggest problem is that it's hit or miss, from state to state, school to school, and even teacher to teacher. We pay teachers so little, show them so little respect, and abuse them so badly, that it suppresses the desire to become a teacher. It is NOT considered a prestigious job. Many see it as a job for losers who can't do anything else. They just have to be smarter than a kid, which is frankly a challenge in America. People often start out as smart kids, and then get DE-educated by the Conservative Propaganda Machine, and become voluntary morons.
It's always been like that, but it has gotten worse lately. It used to be that if you curated your high school classes carefully, getting the best teachers in your school, you could get a great public school education. My brother is a bonafide genius, and he got a great public school education, and a full-ride bachelors and masters scholarships at great, and expensive, private colleges. The way some states behave toward education, I'm not sure that's possible today.
Not all of it is the fault of the government, at least of the immediate situation. Covid blew a giant hole in the education of an entire generation. Those kids lost about 2 years of real education and social skills, that they'll never get back, and it shows.
My son went back to college at 26, to get a more "versatile" degree (one that encourages employment), so he has a lot of 18-20 year olds in his classes, and he's not only appalled by how little they know, but also their behavior. They are practically feral, watching YouTube or Tok Tok videos with headphones while the prof is teaching, being openly hostile to the profs teaching choices, refusing to do the homework, sabotaging the class with ignorant arguments, etc. In a film analysis class, the class was openly, loudly hostile about the choice of film they'd be studying for the entire semester, even though it was clearly listed in the course description. They knew it wasn't a Marvel movie going in, why did they even sign up?
And he's seeing profs be openly hostile to his classes, too. Luckily, he stands out (he's distinctive looking), and he's extremely intelligent, so his teachers have already pegged him as the one to have a class discussion with, so the rest can watch, and maybe learn how to learn.
And before Covid, there was Bush's 2008 Economic Crash, which happened while he was in elementary school. Years later, my son talked about what an impact it had on his class, kids were suddenly leaving, new kids coming in, etc. because of losses of jobs and houses, relocating, trying to fit into a new course curriculum, classes were constantly changing, kids were losing their friends (impacting even those that weren't directly affected), etc. The mental strain on the youngest kids was enormous, and nobody noticed it, or cared, or helped them, and it put a bad dent in their early personality formation. Now the current generation is about to experience another economic crash that is almost certainly going to be worse.
And today we have a Department of Education that is in total disarray, by design. Eventually they will eliminate it all together, using a profoundly stupid Sociopathic Wrestling Industry Oligarch as the hit man. MAGA is openly hostile to education and intelligence, because stupid people, without Critical Thinking Skills, are much easier to manipulate. As Trump himself said: "I love the uneducated "