It is more than the federal government. Perhaps, I can persuade you that all government owned and run K-12 schooling, on every level ( federal, state, and local) should be abolished. Why?
Answer: Government schooling is a freedom of conscience and First Amendment abomination no matter how big or small the districts.
1) It is impossible to have a religiously, politically, and culturally neutral education. All education has a worldview that his **not** neutral in its content or consequences. Therefore....When government owns and runs education it imposes a government sanctioned NON-neutral worldview on the children and forces the taxpayer to pay for it. This would be true even if districts were the size of a city block. One group of neighbors would be imposing their worldview on neighbors who were less politically powerful.
2) Government run schooling is socialist-funded schooling. It is a single-payer entitlement . Simply by attending children risk learning to be comfortable with socialism. They risk learning that any government powerful enough to give a child tuition-free schooling is powerful enough to give them **lots** of free stuff. ( Franklin D. Roosevelt wasn't an accident. All it took was one to three generations of socialist schooling.)
3) When the earliest modern government schools were formed in the mid-1800s), the worldview of these schools necessarily had to be generic and lukewarm in their Protestant worldview. What does Christ do with the lukewarm? He spits them out of His mouth. The pressure was constantly toward more and more secularism. By the 1950s and early 1960s government schools merely nodded in the direction of God. The curriculum was thoroughly secular. Children in these schools had to learn to think and reason secularly just to cooperate in the classroom.
4) Today's schools are utterly godless in their worldview. The children must think and reason godlessly to cooperate with the teacher and assignments. ( At least while in the school.)
5) Finally, no scientific study of the contributions of the parents has ever been measured. We do **not** know if institutionalized schooling actually teaches the child anything. No one has ever measured the private tutoring, the preschool work, the help with the homework, and the child's own hours spent studying **in the home**. It is possible that we, as Americans spend billions a year on institutionalized schooling, and the real work is being done in the home.
Anecdotally, when I question parents of successful institutionalized and homeschooled children, I find **NO** difference in the amount of work done by the parent or the child **in the HOME**.
If you can think of an exception I would welcome it, but the above applies to all of our nation's government run, socialist-funded, compulsory, and religiously NON-neutral schools. They are an abomination regardless of whether the children learn to read or not.
Once again we are hearing from all talk and no action.
Does it bother you at all the the more rational members of your group do not support your methods/ attitude?