I don't think the issues with public education are so much an issue of funding in and of itself as they are the consequences of multiple factors coming together to produce a generalized institutional and bureaucratic decline towards disfunction. I think part or that comes around towards an overfocus on standards being uniform across all socio economic categories when in reality that leads to a lowering of standards across the board for everyon when it cannot be tolerated within the bureaucratic machine to pick winners and losers and instead equality must be the norm.

This i think is the fundamental paradox of equality in general, while it's a good goal and that we should be trying to create a public education system that does allow for those of less fortunate backgrounds to succeed, we do need to realize that there is value in a meritocracy but that means necessarily that some will not be up to the standards.

I think with public education it may be generally a better idea to keep the institutional size small and give the control of the schools themselves and the politics there to the smallest level of government possible, and that federal level educational institutions may do more harm than good in the long term if they are given any power to actually enforce rather than recommend policy.

Homeschooling is a whole can of worms I won't get into at the moment. It's deeply problematic and leads to all sorts of issues that go beyond simply wasting future talent, that's also an issue with subpar public schools.

Basically I think if you're going to fix the issues of public schools you've got to change the mindset around them being a top down government service and more a bottom up community endeavor. Basically you're going to have to do a marriage of the ideals of good public education , universal access, social contact with ones peers, etc, with the ideals of good homeschooling which is active parental involvement.

I think that right now the bureaucratic machine is seeing the demographic failure of equality and integration and is simply trying to artificially shift the numbers more towards their desired outcome by changing the criteria rather than attempting to deal with the non-racial factors that are relevant towards those numbers.

Also think a culture of safetyism is causing a massive issue. You hear about schools banning stuff like tag because maybe a kid will get injured. I'd say freak accidents aside, if a kid breaks their arm or something, there's no issue, it's a learning experience and you have to let kids get hurt if they are stupid so long as it's something they can overcome and grow from (so like obviously if the kid dies they can't learn from that)

On the other hand I think you do need to separate the problem kids from the general population and give them special treatment for the good of the whole.

Also think some degree of gender separation might be highly beneficial towards catering to different learning styles so long as you aren't so strict about it you fail to account for the odd boy that may do better in the girls class and vice versa.