Public schools fail, and cannot be made not to fail (eg, by putting more money in), precisely because they are a mirror of society. When I and my peers experienced public secondary school, there was a broad consensus on right and wrong, decency and indecency, proper behavior and improper, and what constituted educational excellence–and importantly, what did not. The consensus crossed all religious groups, and the non-religious as well.

You can do a reasonable job of public education when there’s consensus on these things. We got a decent education for about 1/5 the cost, in comparable dollars, of what it costs to mis-educate students today.

When there is no consensus on any of these there cannot be an effective public education system. As the schools have failed and failed, we have done what we usually do–assume that more money is needed. However, when the “First Things” in the system guarantee failure, more money simply enables the system to fail more quickly, and more spectacularly.