I would agree that a large amounts of school districts are failing in the U.S. The main reasoning for this, that I come to is money. I'm not speaking about a lack of funding either. School districts have too much overhead. Most of this overhead is going to pay administrators inflated salaries. There are also way too many pointless administration positions. The biggest problem with these jobs is that we can't get rid of them, due to unions. We want to eliminate a pointless administration job that soaks up a 200k salary then the union will most likely settle this by offering to pay a compensation package of 500k. This coupled with the fact that there a ton of lazy(bad) teachers who have tenure and won't be fired no matter how little they try.