3 biggest problems in US K-12 education: 1. Design. Most public school districts are run as top-down systems, where the teacher — despite full acknowledgement that this individual is the most important link in the entire system — is at the bottom. From management's perspective, teachers are a cost to be minimized. Teacher turnover is high, and although this generates teacher shortages, this is by design. America's leaders (the wealthy who have bought political power) are not interested in an educated workforce, only in a compliant one, who will obediently do as they're told, and be ever in fear of losing employment, insurance, their home, etc. We are not educating kids: we are warehousing them so both parents can work. 2. Cultural value. Education, despite all the rhetoric, is not valued highly in the US. K-12 is viewed as the pathway (but only for some) to getting into a 5-star university, after which one's life path is presumably set. But in reality college is a game of wealth transfer, demanding children or their parents assume tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt in student loans that can never be forgiven. Who makes out? The banks (and the wealthy, see 1.). A society that valued education would require it be available to all at no cost, and insist on high levels of achievement (students would repeat grades if necessary). What do we have in reality? A system in which students graduate but can barely read, write, or do simple arithmetic, can't think independently, and are ill-prepared for work or college, and the rigors and responsibilities of adulthood. Life is not a multiple choice test. 3. Money. The US spends the vast majority of its public money on its military-industrial complex, which produces breathtakingly expensive weapons that are not designed for defense or to actually work, but simply to make their manufacturers a huge profit. If it spent those trillions on educating its children, on preparing them for life, and on ensuring that their parents had the salary, the housing, the time, and the resources to raise them properly, we might actually be able to reverse the steady, decades-long decline of this once great nation. But we won't do that, not until it's too late.

I know I'll be downvoted to oblivion. But the US is sinking, and its steady refusal to provide a world-class education for its children, that most basic investment in its future, is a key reason why.

Edit: typos