I don't think the public educational system has a goal. It's run primarily for the benefit of a small cadre of professional administrators who inhabit the only positions in the system that pay decent salaries. Their primary goal is to not make waves or rock the boat until they can retire. The failure of public eduction is due to the refusal of these administrators to establish order and discipline in the classroom in order to avoid litigation. And the ultimate cause is an anti-intellectualism on the part of parents that sees a diploma as a passport to the middle class, and which their larvae are entitled to regardless if anything is actually learned or not. School is about socialization, fashion, cliques, sex, cars and football (drugs and liquor are electives) . All that crap that goes on in the classroom is BOR-ING, and strictly for sissies.

It sounds like a cliche, but when a kid has trouble in school, the attitude of the parent should be immediately that it's the kid's fault. That's how it was in my house, the burden of proof was on me, none of that "The teacher has it in for me" crap.

At the university level, the situation is a lot clearer, and more sinister. By the policy of the State of Florida, through sweeping reorganization to the State board of Regents under the Jeb Bush administration, the purpose of the University is now to "teach the students what they need to know, not how to think". In other words, the university's primary task is to train technicians and administrators for the corporate sector, not trouble-making over-educated working class hippies.
It costs a lot more too, that helps keep the hoi polloi out.

At the risk of sounding like an old fart, I went to a rural high school in redneck Florida, but there was strict discipline in the classroom, backed by spankings and expulsions, if necessary, and I had access to courses that prepared me very well for the State University system, such as literature, composition, chemistry, physics, foreign languages, (French, Spanish and Latin) and math through analytical geometry, limits and the derivative. For those students who elected to do so, there were good general, vocational and commercial curricula as well. My Cuban cousin Rudy, a near-graduate of a more European-style secondary school system, observed that our school was about two years behind his own, but that it provided as good an education as you wanted, provided you took all the electives.

As an aside, it might be instructive to consider that Cousin Rudy was only 16 when he came to Brandon High. He was put in the sophomore class. He had already had in his school all the math and science courses offered in my school, and already spoke good English. And at his school, he played béisbol.