Western parents

So not exactly crap just partly. Of course you do need to limit the scope a bit to the existing design. Current teachers rarely if ever get to provide more than the sparse advice when it comes to educational programs. Instead they are just handed the information and if they're lucky get a quick course on how this new "program" works and told to implement the plan. So with that in mind and only using the current educational model as your template the article does point out one the biggest factors for schools failing. Cause let me tell you when parents do their jobs as parents that torture you spoke of almost entirely disappears. It's amazing what a child can accomplish when they have support at home and at school for their education.

I enjoyed HS... but I was a know-it-all asshole, slept through most of my classes, even the AP courses, tried to find ways to help my friends cheat because I liked the challenge (what I did for the final exam in ECON was brilliant... wrote down all the answers, went to the bathroom and hid them under the trash can... homies would go in one at a time, take the answers, copy them then put them back) and just generally cracked jokes when I was awake. Life was so easy then.

It certainly doesn't help when most classrooms are overcrowded. The best ratio of student to teacher is 10:1 however many classrooms have 20, 30, even 40 students. Nothing like depending on 1 teacher to do the work of 4 teachers.

Yeah I agree, it's tricky and difficult for the teacher and students with numbers so high. I'm not educated on how numbers of students are controlled though and whether that's an issue of taking in too many students or the school presume a teacher can handle that many.

Mostly it comes down to finances. The public schools (US) simply aren't given enough funding to pay for the teachers needed to reduce that burden. That's not even counting the lack of materials. It's not uncommon to have texts book 10-20 years old whose repeated use leads to missing pages, covers, sometimes even complete chapters missing. Unfortunately, you have a bunch of overpaid paper pushers without much or any experience/education in the education field deciding on how much is needed. And they typically see it as "well they been handling it so far, that just proves it works as is".

That's unfortunate, in Australia we have pretty good school supplies but we still have a problem of Public/ Private school barriers and which schools should get what etc. It's because schools are run like businesses, not places for children to learn, it's all about profit now and it's not how education should be handled.

capitalism doesn't work like that, sorry.

unfortunately

We can invest less into the school sports teams.