Let me try to answer that, and with an unordered list of a few of the things that are wrong with the schools. I take this question from a recent Quora Question, “What is wrong with American high schools?” changing it to include all American schools. (I  have placed Quora’s answer, written by a Gwen Brooks, below.)

• It’s the idea that there is a place where children may best learn, everything and anything. That’s wrong, there is no such place.
• It’s the idea that in this same place virtue can be taught. That’s wrong. There is no place that can claim to have ever taught virtue, although that’s not the same thing as saying that virtue can never be learned there, for virtue can be at least acquired, if not learned, anywhere.
• It’s the idea that a school structure can be originally devised, subsequently and continually reformed and tweeked to eventually come up with a perfect school structure for learning. That’s wrong. Closer to the truth would be that there are as many ideal school structures as there are students in the school, no single structure good enough to make other structures unnecessary.
• It’s the idea that skills (not virtue) can be taught by people/teachers not necessarily in possession of those skills themselves, be it playing the violin or finding unknowns as in mathematics. Wrong. Skill learning or acquisition is most effective, if done at least in the presence of those in possession of the targeted skill. There are skills that can probably be acquired from scratch, like dunking the basketball, or the vibrato produced in vocal or instrumental music by rapid, slight alternations in pitch.
• It’s the idea that kids of the same age learn best together. That idea is really wrong, horribly wrong. Tell me did your parents keep you with your older and younger siblings, or did they look for your companions among other children of your age? Well both of course, but from whom did you learn the most? Perhaps the greatest mistake the schools have made is to assume that one learns best from others of the same age. Whereas it is common knowledge that learning, learning of new things, is best done with the help of those not of the same age, but older, and even younger, than you.
• But what’s most wrong with the schools is probably their being based to a large extent on the founding ideas  of Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) and Horace Mann (1796-1859).
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  These founding ideas are still the very same ideas that energize the people who today most defend the public schools. Mann was not yet born when  Jefferson, as a very young man in 1776, wrote our country’s Declaration of Independence, but Jefferson’s words that all men are created equal, are endowed with certain unalienable Rights, including Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. must have been much on his mind when he wrote himself that universal public education was the best way to turn American children into disciplined, judicious republican citizens. Jefferson, no less that Mann, was an firm advocate of public education. In a 1786 letter to George Wythe, he remarked that most important is the diffusion of knowledge among the people. He believed that “no other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom and happiness” and that failing to provide public education would “leave the people in ignorance.”

• Wrong, as the Donald would say in a tweet. The schools, in spite of our most cherished beliefs and wishes for them have never been that, an institution to turn our kids into a responsible citizenry. A kind of virtue that never has been and won’t ever be taught in the schools. This is what’s wrong with the schools: having constantly failed over a period of nearly 200 years to do what their founders had in mind for them. It’s not that they didn’t know a lot about education, Jefferson in regard to his own skills and knowledge being almost a university himself. But in Jefferson’s case what he knew most about was his own learning path, being probably the very best example out there of life long learning. And those of us who entertain similar life learning ambitions look to him as the model. But he never saw what the schools would become, although in his letters he does show that the kids were unruly, not as ready to learn as he first thought.
• Have to stop, but my list of what’s wrong with the schools is not by any means completed… Add your own to the list. Or make a list of what’s right with the schools. Are there things that are right with the schools?