“No matter how well run the princpal problem remains. For a government school, the government is the customer and the kids are the product.”
Yeah, can’t argue with that .Ideally, the parents should be the customer (parents pay) and as you stated the kids should be the product. If the teachers unions could be eliminated though, local school boards could truly represent the wishes of their constituents (taxpayers/parents) and run their schools as intended. But, wishful thinking on my part. Barring that, vouchers might be the only way to have real competition in K thru 12. But, that’s probably wishful thinking too.
I do seem to see more and more stories of charter schools popping up and clearly out performing their government counterparts. That said I don't think we can truly correct education until we remove federal funding (and even stat funding) from the process. In any case, if it is possible to pull America out of it's death spiral, taking our kids back from government indoctrination would be a good place to start.