Your generalization of 'public schools are failures' is not valid.
In that case, they will do just fine in a competitive environment. The public schools can explain how they offer excellence in education and won't lose any students to parochial or other private schools.
When compared (which is a favorite slanted ploy) with other nations, when the special ed and all others that don't do well are excluded from test taking and tracked in vocational directions U.S. schools do quite well.
Ah, a straw man, how clever.
Of course, special ed has never been part of the scores used to determine academic competency. You're just blowing smoke in hopes of obscuring the facts.
Actually, ours is modeled on the Prussian system of the 19th century and is pretty well an exact duplicate. Most post-Soviet nations have abandoned the Prussian model, but not American educrats.
The drivers on the podium know they won, but the "drivers" that finished in the back of the pack could have possibly put more effort into finishing somewhere toward the back and are catching all the grief for not doing anything to succeed.
Ah yes, OBE - effort is more important than performance.
Of course this is idiocy, the incompetent may expend more effort than the master builder, but that will be scant comfort when the roof crashes in about you.
There is a lot more factors they can't control...but they are blamed by the uninformed.
They are blamed when they engage in idiocy like OBE and other fad methods that continually render poor results.