I would not have educated myself as a child or teenager.What I mean is if you were chained to a desk and forced to study something, would your mind have automatically picked out relationships and meanings, even if they were not explicitly drilled? Most people in the upper third of intelligence do this almost automatically. For them, the curriculum is not the education.
"The problem is that half of people are not smart enough."
The studies of IQ and life outcome suggest that people of below-average intelligence do not spontaneously deduce general principles when given many specific examples. If you teach them to read by word recognition training, they will not figure out the rules of phonics on their own. It will be difficult or impossible for them to read a word that was not trained into them in childhood. (Whereas even really thick people trained in phonics can read words like "platen" or "vellus" that they have never seen before, and they can make themselves understood at writing down words they know but have never seen spelled.)
States once had a lot of leeway in their education systems.
I was thinking of decentralization even at a lower level. If all the schools in a city are captured by a stupid fad, it may take decades for the city to escape. If individual schools are left to run themselves, the ones that pick dumb ideas will lose students/money to schools that pick good ideas.
She'd have no idea what graphs mean, and even if she got it to some degree it would be very easy to mislead her.
She wouldn't be able to understand "the students here get the worst scores in town"? And she would keep not understanding it for 13 years? And you would never figure it out and ask to go somewhere else? There may be some students in that situation, but there are many families with some degree of awareness and ambition, and their ambitions will promptly show up in budget cuts.