Although I do think the DOE should be abolished and the burden sent back to the states....I have several relatives in education. They say the primary problem is lack of parent involvement.
I am divided. When I was in school a bazillion years ago, the teachers taught. But my parents made sure I did my homework. On my own.
They didn't sit down with me and try to continue teaching.
One thing that is missing from the picture that was there a bazillion years ago: Mom. Currently, mom and dad have to work, or mom is working, dad is gone, and mom gets some form of assistance to make ends meet.
When I was little, Dad worked, and Mom worked hard, too, but as a homemaker and full time parent while Dad brought home the bacon (and venison, and wild duck--as did we when we got old enough, and that 'old enough' was a lot younger than what it is today)
But it was my mother who played Offenbach and Beethoven and Tchaikovsky on the record player, who sufferedd through a thousand iterations of "one fish, two fish...
and later read Shakespeare back and forth with us as kids. She (and Dad) decided in those dark days before the internet that having Britannica in the library was worth it, along with an Unabridged Dictionary, and who constantly admonished us to "Look it up" long before Google was just a few keystrokes away--something it still isn't there, without Starlink or a Hotspot (which is dodgy, at best). To her I owe a lot of my education, and to the encouragement of my grandfather who loved A Conan Doyle and Mark Twain, among so many others.
They understood, that no matter what turn politics may take, what government can do, that even if your lands are seized and you are stripped naked, no one can take what you know away. Of all treasures a family can have, the one earthly thing that cannot be stolen by invading armies or robber barons is an education.
The social devaluing of actual learning, and the pollution/dilution of a classical education that is being perpetrated by Marxists, their useful idiots roped in with the lures of victimhood politics, with 'status' granted to the standard bearers of programs which award honors on those who excel as poster children for 'equity' programs, devoid of any merit save their ability to demand things they have not earned, and muddling even the most basic concepts of everything from math to human biology.
If I could carve one word from the human lexicon, it would be "racist", because it has become not an epithet to hurl at those genuinely guilty thereof (often by those who are practicing it even as they utter it), but an excuse for those who would rather play victim than invest the work involved in earning genuine merit.
As such, the pursuit of excellence has been lost down the dark rabbit hole of ignorance, justified by nonsense.