Public schools like the one you describe exist, but they're on one end of a spectrum. My wife teaches English at a pubic school on the other end. Their student

Public schools like the one you describe exist, but they're on one end of a spectrum. My wife teaches English at a pubic school on the other end. Their student body is mostly minorities. The library contains only books written by dead white men which the students are inherently mistrustful of. They can't afford new novels, so the teachers print excerpts at home and bring them to class. In 2017 they blew their printing budget. In 2018 and 2019 we printed more than 35k pages at home because the school couldn't afford more toner. In 2021 they'll be in the black re: toner again, so my home printer will get a break until they blow the budget again. Public schools are funded based on property taxes of the surrounding neighborhoods. Some of them have money to burn, others can't afford books. My wife's school has the best teachers in town. Nobody goes into teaching for the money, and nobody teaches as a school like hers because they think it's gonna be an easy job--those sorts gravitate to the schools with money to burn and students that aren't also homeless. More important than fixing the absolute amount of funding that public schools have is fixing the way it's distributed. It should a flat rate per-student, adjusted only for cost of living at a city-by-city granularity, not a neighborhood-by-neighborhood granularity. Once the public school experience is more equal across the board it will be easier to distinguish the good teachers that lack supplies from the bad teachers with resources to waste.