The factories that will tend to succeed are those that adopt policies that give them lower costs and a higher quality product. It would be the same with schools if there were freedom of choice and the discipline of accountability. With those twin elements of choice and accountability, you would have an institutional structure where you wouldn't have to tell individual schools what to do. Individual schools would have a powerful incentive to find what it is that works. But by and large, public schools today do not operate in such a structure.
Parental choice is the necessary condition for accountability on the part of the school officials.
Accountability from the school's point of view equals choice from the parent's point of view. The fact that the parents can choose leads to accountability of the school officials. The federal and state governments offer very strong inducements to school officials to choose particular programs, but those programs aren't really tailored to the needs of the individual school. A lot of them are touchy-feely programs, like violence prevention, anger management, and conflict resolution. These programs are very, very highly thought of in the academic educational community, but the evidence in their favor is not very strong, and they may even be counter-productive.