The public school system is lacking in the United States.
Teaching is not wholely to blame, some of the blame needs to be passed onto the parents.
Therefore, the government needs to empower parents to make good smart decisions about their children. This means that if parents want to send their kids to private school, the government should help that.
We also need to give states more rights in how they coordinate education. The government as a whole cannot govern education identically across every state. That is because some states like California are burdened by a bilingual education problem and other states like Alabama are lacking nice facilities and modern books.
Here's a hilarious MAD TV Schoolhouse Rock parody depicting serious problems with our public school system:
