Most proposals aim to improve the school system without fundamentally changing it. Here are the widely ignored issues that demand attention. Public schools are accountable to government officials even though experience tells us that producers should be directly accountable to the people they serve.
Humans are incredibly diverse, yet public schools aim to educate every child the same way.
Specialization enhances productivity and the quality of services, but we preclude specialization by politicizing curriculum, textbook content, and by assigning everyone in a neighborhood to the same school. Our policy of funding public schools rather than children presumes against a mountain of contemporary and historical evidence that competition is good for everything but K-12 schools. All that the data tell us is that most existing private schools produce slightly better, but still utterly unacceptable results, much more efficiently than public schools. It's like debating whether we should put better tires and higher-octane fuel in a badly designed car. Look at some current proposals, and alleged experiments.