Its our own fault. If candidates for state boards of education and elective university seats had gotten as many votes as Romney, we could have taken nearly every state level education related seat in the country.
Putting Republicans in charge of a socialist system is more likely to turn the Republicans into socialists than to make many improvements. Even if systems were under strictly local control, the fact that it’s tax-funded takes responsibility away from the actual users, and therefore takes decision-making away from the actual users.
A government system will always tend to drive out competitors, because the lack of a funding limit eliminates constraints on spending. The government interest-group (politicians, employees, consumers) can legislate against competition by setting requirements that private enterprise cannot meet within their costs constraints.
The more the system expands, the more every decision becomes a death-struggle, because every unit and every student will be affected by it. As employees become more numerous, they conceive of themselves as a “stakeholder” whose interests oppose those of the public and the students.
Etc., and so on ... and also, you knew all this ;-).