Even people without children should be concerned about education, if not for the goddamn improvement of the species, at least because they will be future voters that will infact affect your life (unless you're about to die any moment).
So the solution to the current liberal progressive run education system is .... and even more liberal and progressive run education system.
We all care about education, me even more then you considering this isn't even your country. I would love to pay
teachers more money but it never works out that way, instead the
administrators take the lions share of the increased budget to either raise their salary or hire even more administrative staff. And unlike practically every poster here I've actually seen how the bureaucratic systems work from the inside and monetary efficiency is the last thing on their minds. Instead you get head bureaucrats who's only purpose is to further their career by making it out that they do more then they really do. To justify a bigger position / promotion they add additional staff to their own departments and then inflate up the listed responsibilities on paper. They use the over inflated responsibilities of their underlings to justify a bigger position because they are "managing" more and this cycle continues until the entire system is overburdened and then starts to collapse under it's own weight. Actual children and their education is paid mere lip service with the real product being the administrative staff's career advancement.
That is why there needs to be charter schools, to offer parents an alternate choice and therefor create an incentive for public school administrators to run leaner and focus on education quality as the product instead of their own career advancement. This was the original goal of Common Core, to create a single set of metrics that could be used to evaluate and put pressure on those same bureaucratic administrators to focus on actual education, but instead it was hijacked by, no surprise, those same administrators and the Education Industry they work in. It's become the poisoned fruit and thus a failure.
Throughout centuries of recorded human existence the one thing that'a always created development and increased quality of everything has been competition. On a micro scale it goes through ups and downs as winners and losers fight it out, on a macro scale it creates growth and increased quality. 5 year trend line vs 30 year trend line.
Finally, there is a reason wealthy individuals send their kids to private school and are mortified about their kids going near public school.