Amen, I think private schools for non medically specific populations (autism, sensory disabilities, etc) should be illegal as well. As it is we have:

A) Public schools in complete ruin for the poor kids with busy working parents that don’t have time to enter charter lotteries. Glorified daycare where hope goes to die.

B) the trojan horse charter schools meant to hand the funding for public ed to the greedy oligarchs. Most of these indoctrinate kids with right-wing lunacy. They are marketed as an escape hatch for middle class parents with some time to advocate for their kids while starving our public school’s funding further, by design. “muh free market makes everything better” while sociopaths get richer standard American bullshit. This is designed to siphon any middle class complainers with any means away from the public ed funding fight, leaving fewer advocates for the public education system to rebuild it from its present ruin.

C) The owner’s kids private schools, where they learn they are humans who will control and exploit all the subhuman poorie livestock. They will be taught this sociopathic behavior is benevolent and the natural order.

All of these children should be FORCED, yes FORCED, by force of law to go to to the same public schools depending on their area. If we wanted a society, all the socio-economic statuses would be FORCED to have their children socialize and realize none of them intrinsically deserve Moooooooooore than the other kids. We already mandate education for children as we should, this isn’t a big ask. Rich people just demand their kids to get a better education than yours to keep the game nice and rigged generationally on every front.

It will never happen because the owners don’t want it to and propagandize their cattle not to want it either, but it would need to happen for us to one day become a society. As it is, rich kids don’t talk to poor kids, so they have no problem as rich adults hurting faceless poor people for another dollar. Any psychogist will tell you, empathy must be learned from a young age, and the US goes to extremes to avoid teaching it at all. We prefer “fuck you whether or not I got mine.”

If it did happen, our public schools would be funded, rebuilt shiny and chrome, with school supplies exploding out of the roof so fucking fast you’d think you were magically teleported to Norway.

It’s not that schools shouldn’t be funded by property tax, it’s that the revenue collected should be pooled and distributed equitably among the state’s public schools. Cincinnati OH does it this way (they call it “funding where you learn, not where you live”) so it’s possible with enough political will.

K-12 needs pencils, markers, pens, construction paper, regular paper, notebooks, assignment folders, erasers, pencil sharpeners, call it what you want but books with text kids need to read when they get home, art supplies because yes art is important to development, and most actual developed nations unlike our gold plated shithole also provides technology like tablets or laptops of some kind to their kids, not just their rich kids at the right schools.

If your point is that we should race to the bottom and provide the cheapest possible nuts and bolts education devoid of any curriculum not directly tied to becoming an efficient wage slave by eliminating any creative expression in K-12, I would contend that such a society isn’t worth existing and those kids would be better off dead than to be taught their very lives and educations exist solely in service to our beloved economy.

That’s a better teacher to student ratio than I had growing up in what was considered a good school district.