If you want to know why US schools are in the trouble they are, read this article about public schools in Loudon County, VA.
The dad, Brian Davison, became enemy #1 for being a concerned parent.
A couple items from the article that are very telling and very discouraging:
After Davison raised questions at a school-board meeting, board member Debra Rose, a former congressional staffer for the House Judiciary Committee, requested that a sheriff’s deputy remove him. The officer did not.
In March 2015, Rose’s husband summoned police to their home, where “Ms. Rose advised that Mr. Davison has not made any specific threats directed towards her, but he has made her feel extremely uncomfortable.” The police took no action.
In May, her husband called police again to tell them that Davison “is posting links on [an Internet] forum to [Ms. Rose’s] campaign Web site which displays herself and her family members including her children.” The officer responded, according to his police report, that “this may not be a crime because this certain post is a link of his wife’s campaign Web site.”
Rose called Davison’s elderly father to try to shame him. She e-mailed his employer five times.
After Davison tried to raise testing issues at a PTA meeting in September 2015, the school’s principal, Tracy Stephens, issued a notice that she said made it a crime for him to come to the school for any reason.
And then this :
The day the no-trespassing order was posted to Davison’s front door, Stephens called the police on him while he waited off school property to pick up his kids. She refused to allow his children to join him. The police told the principal that Davison was entitled to pick up his children, but, according to the police report, Stephens demanded, “I want him arrested!”
When that did not work, she reported Davison to Child Protective Services as a suspected child abuser.
It was not children she was concerned about. The complaint said Davison “exhibits agression [sic] and hostility toward LCPS leadership during public meetings.”
Stephens faxed 62 pages of information to the agency, which has the power to take children away from their parents. They consisted almost entirely of Davison’s comments on school policies or officials’ apparent violations of them. Tacked on the end were two claims that purportedly showed child abuse: One day, his daughter could not play kickball because she was “sent to school in rain boots.” Another day, a teacher said she saw Davison’s children with him and “both of the kids had straight faces.”
And this:
“Schools do not exist to employ teachers. They exist to effectively educate kids,” he said.
That was a position everyone except special-interest insiders was likely to agree with, and parents did. In 2018, the countywide PTA, which held official status with the school system and had its Web site and meetings hosted by it, elected Davison as its president.
The school system refused to accept the election and said the organization would be dissolved.
Fourteen months after Davison filed his lawsuit, in December 2015, the Republican-controlled Congress passed a massive, bipartisan education law called the Every Student Succeeds Act. Buried in it was a provision forbidding the government from asking or incentivizing states to use student-growth data to evaluate teachers. The change came following lobbying by the unions.