Excellent summary/analysis. I do think, though, that the destructive anti-public school forces have power to some degree because the pro-public school authorities keep enforcing practices and policies in arrogant, even counter-educational ways. The structure and content of our schools has not adapted to the information world we live in today, and is almost exclusively dedicated, especially on those standardized exams, to the deceptively narrow world of academia and the 4 year liberal arts university. Significantly, many of the moral and social beliefs of that world flow heavily down into public schools as well.

Public schools are still a public commodity, but they now serve, or are served by, with often dismissive, arrogant authoritarianism, a very small academic elite.