Those are all true statements but I was referring to the degradation from the top levels (fed/state) pushing for private schooling and further ignoring public education despite the fact that it would be an investment into the country as a whole to improve education. Similar to how universal healthcare would relieve the already overburdened system by allowing people to take care of their problems before they become expensive and complicated problems.

While most money comes from local taxes and people hate to pay them (a different discussion on percentage of taxes for different socioeconomic groups), this could have been offset by federal or state funds to make up the difference to a certain level.

Ideally, we'd have a system that looked at the metrics such as test scores, higher education or trade pipeline, and other necessary data to find the weak spots to focus on for improvement instead of the current "if you don't have x amount of y score, you lose funding" punishment method that only incentivises people to massage the numbers or is otherwise advantageous to more prosperous areas that can afford to meet the metric.

With all that, you also have to get the buy-in of the average taxpayer who only knows "gubment raised muh taxes!" instead of looking at it looking term.

I think I've rambled enough on it for the moment. Hope it made sense