The issue with public education is a complex one, but ultimately it often comes down to race and class in the current system. Race and class segregation often means that kids in one district have great schools,because they have the tax base and also because many of the people living there are families where the parents are educated and have the means themselves to help their kids in a variety of ways, whereas kids in other districts have low tax base and often the families are struggling (it is usually associated with race, but the reality is a lot of rural school districts that are racially mostly white don’t do very well for much the same reasons).
Some of the problem IMO is how the US is set up, we are the only industrialized country as far as I know where they leave schooling for the most part to the states and local school districts (and yes, it is a constitutional issue, because education by not being in the constitution given to the federal government is a state and local government issue, though there are clauses and reasons why the federal government gets involved), it is ironic that the countries the US compares its education to, the ones who do so well on standardized tests, all have a strong central government control of education or strongly influential. Worse, most school funding is based on local property taxes, and that is the big disaster, it means the very people who need good schools to boost them up (rural areas like Appalachia, inner city areas, etc) don’t have the tax base to pay for what they need, and in many places there is reluctance to make up for the difference with other money, federal or state.
The other factor is the segregation of various sorts that exists in the US, racial and economic, often schools are very much homogenized, ie schools tend to be either entirely poor kids, entirely middle and upper middle income students, or really well off in many places. Scarsdale in Westchester county has some of the highest performing schools in the country, whereas a surrounding city like White Plains has struggling schools in more than a few of its schools, one of the things IMO that helps schools is when there is a mix of kids and kids see something other than their own little bubble, whether it is well off kids or poor kids only. During the Great Depression and in the immediate postwar years NYC had a public education system that was the envy of the world, turned out a lot of high performing kids during one of the worst economic dislocations in US and world history, and one of the reasons was because while NYC was segregated, the schools were still a lot more integrated than today, my mom went to a school that already had a sizeable black population in the Bronx (same high school Colin Power graduated from a number of years later), they had kids who were kids of the working class, middle class kids, and kids whose families were doing relatively well (my mom’s dad worked for the controller of Union Carbide), post war because of white flight and other issues, the schools became what they are today.
It is even worse with states like Mississippi that are very proud of being low tax, across the board their schools are some of the worst in the country and a lot of that is tied to not spending money on the schools (yes, it is true that money alone doesn’t solve problems, but lack of money most definitely is tied to lack of achievement with schools; take a look at the states at the bottom of school performance in the US, and it is directly correlated to being at the bottom of the spending in the US as well).
The US is a funny place, we talk about the value of education, we complain our kids are falling behind, how kids in other countries do better than we do, but when we talk about reforming how the schools are run, people start screaming ‘local control of schools’, when that is often tied to the problems we have.
As far as school choice goes, we have talked about it on here before, but from what i have seen of those programs, the kids it supposedly is supposed to help (kids in failing schools) generally end up not doing much better using a voucher to go to a private school, in large part because the schools they can afford with the voucher aren’t that great, and what they often end up being used for is parents using voucher money to subsidize the tuition to the schools they want their kids to go to, and quite often it isn’t because the school they are leaving is not good, it is because they want their kid to go to a religious school that fits their beliefs, last thing I read about the Indiana voucher program is that most of the people using it are fundamentalist Christians using it to subsidize their kids going to ‘their’ schools that they kids would have gone to anyway, which is not what they advertise the program to be.