1) Gimmicks:

 Since the 60-70s a variety of Gimmicks have been tried or bizarre weird ideas that are promoted in colleges as they appeal to people who like talking, debating and writing papers on how great their favorite idea is. Basically people in academia are enamored with the gimmicks that give them all sorts of technical terms on learning, theories on how they think people think & thus learn, anything perceived as politically correct is heavily pushed, any idea that appears to make them sound smart appeal's to their ego (these are the folks that like to talk down to others while using terms and words they think you do not understand... they hate it when you do.) Most of these Gimmicks are absolutely impossible for a child to understand especially if most adults can not understand them too. Most Gimmicks are based on seriously flawed studies by publishing companies that have a vested interest in maintaining a copyright & peddling their flawed products. Many professors also write books, develop flawed systems of education and get royalties so they teach what ever they have developed is awesome and their students believe it mindlessly. 

2) Short Cuts/Speed

Americans as a rule think faster is better. When they attempt to apply that idea to education it is always a disaster. Adults (teachers are adults) sometimes have trouble with going slow, and try to take short cuts. Teaching a dog 1 behavior requires a minim of 15 times of the dog doing it correctly on command, that does not include all the steps before in which Fido did not get it, most people with a dog that never learns to sit do not have the patience to waist the 30 minutes a day every day till Fido get's it... same applies to children, most adults get impatient and give up too soon in the teaching/learning process or try and create a short cut in the process which results in failure if not right away latter in more advanced levels of the subject.  Slow and steady wins the education race for all subjects.

3) Over focussing on one way of learning.

Over the past few years I have noted there is an attempt to make all children conform to just one teaching/learning style, and any child that is not compatible with this style is flawed... this is untrue, the child is fine, the system is flawed. The style I have noted is heavily based on using a computer as soon as possible. This means only children that are highly Visual with medium to low audio input requirements and are sedentary by nature will do well and everyone else will struggle. There was even a really poorly done study that attempted to say children did not learn through kinetics and kinetic learners are a myth. In my experience classroom settings that use all 3 input methods in a balanced way generally have all students at grade level... but it is more work for the teacher. There are lazy teachers, I have met a few.

4) Failure to improve one's skills

This is so logical it baffles me why teachers do not do this: If you know you personally have always struggled with a specific subject and you are going to teach it, then you should review it heavily... they don't do that. This is why I have had so many conflicts with teachers & math. Many teachers in America seem to be deficient in arithmetic, yet never for their own peace of mind try to improve their skill level... yes they do continuing ed classes for the state but they shy away from hard subjects and take things like "how to use your magnetic white board more effectively". I always review anything I set out to teach.

5) Teacher's Motivation

Why someone is teaching makes a huge difference in results. When I teach something it is because I see someone needs help, I love the subject, or I have been asked to... I do this because I enjoy seeing people succeed, I enjoy seeing people's quality of life improve, or just enjoy finding someone who I can interact with on a subject I love. All my teaching skills are self taught based on observing teachers with successful classes and unsuccessful classes. I also have asked lots of questions for over 20 years of teaching professionals on how to teach, and I read on the subject from time to time. I made an effort to learn. However that is not why some other people teach... I have noted some people are more interested in "changing the world", "making a difference", "being respected", and "I thought I would make more money"... The first 2 statements are usually made by teachers concerned about PC ideas more then academic success, the third statement comes from teachers who are often bullies, the final statement from teachers that just don't care. 

6) The ever changing standards & programs

The educational system in the USA is influenced by politics. The standards in the USA have been on a down hill slide for years for political reasons. Common Core is clearly a Gimmick system, the math is from a failed USSR experiment from the 1970s, the other assignments clearly are also being used as social engineering. I have heard one to many times children today are just too dumb to learn and it is all the parent's fault., because no one is educated above 5th grade level according to the experts. I think not. Many parents are educated intelligent human beings and are trusting educators & the state to do a good job, so if the state is failing when it has the child from 8 AM to 3 PM 5 days a week I think the state needs to take responsibility and act quickly not take 5 years or more and tons of complaints to acknowledge an issue. Many issues revolve around laws which races can & can not be tested and if tested how, age based advancement, failed social engineering attempts, putting children in special ed to get rid of them and continued use of classroom time to make the children think correctly about adult subjects. Also many programs that fail are failing because how the $ is allotted to the district & program... example ESL (English as a Second Language) programs have done poorly traditional in CA, where we are on 3rd generations of people who can not speak English or read it or write it who all went to CA schools... how did that happen? Easy as long as the children failed to learn English the $ kept coming, if they started learning it went away... so children where only being taught on average 2 words per year of school. But good news, we the people got wise to the scam, and now the funding has changed so districts only get $ if the kids learn English... guess what the children are now learning English. Lesson learned, when ever a government program fails it is important to see under what conditions the program gets paid or funding cut.

I can probably write a college level doctorate paper on why the educational system in the USA is failing so I should stop here... 'cause there is more reasons. LOL!

I guess it could also be analagous to a world full of supers vs. a world with only a few supers. A world full of supers is going to be full of super villains as much as super heroes. But in a world with only a few supers, they can track and identify them and minimize the damage they cause. In other words, perhaps they view education as a weapon to be put in the hands of the few, not the many.

First I have learned that some people suffer from a form of insanity in which the have an emotional attachment to an idea and no matter how many ways or times that idea is proven wrong they will continue to deny the repeatable observable results and with "good intentions" impose the failed idea on others over & over. They can not except they are wrong, made a mistake, as their egos are too fragile.

There are lots of control freak crazies who are out there and always trying to micro-manage everyone's personal life, keeping America stupid or at least pretending that gives them more power over other people's lives. Also many people in colleges use this to encourage the belief among the 18-20ish crowd that their parents are mean spirited idiots or at least everyone else's parents are idiots and that the students & college staff are the only smart, sophisticated and socially aware people in America. (Total holy bovine manure of course but the kids buy into it so it is easier for the professors to manipulate them to think a very specific way). Also it allows another group of people to invalidate any complaint the general public may have about what ever it is that we the people are getting annoyed with, as we are too stupid/bigoted to understand the master plan. The data published by the media in my opinion is false, in that it is extremely easy to create any study that gets the results you want if you know how, I learned how in college to do this, so I know others did also (it is unethical, but people do it all the time) I can rig a study to prove Conservatives have low IQs or Liberals have low IQs with the right words, questions and understanding of demographics, it is absurdly easy to skew such studies. 

I honestly believe based on my life experiences that their are people who believe they are superior in every way to other people, and based on knowing such people I have learned that they truly believe large sections of the general public are inferior humans. Apparently some people need other people to be inferior to feel good & confident about themselves. 

Many genius IQ children are in learn nothing special ed classes nation wide, we are purposely under educating our greatest resource the human brains with the highest potential. From what I can tell part of that problem may be the adults in these children's lives have the low IQs or are just lazy. It is a false premise based again on observation that high IQ parents will produce equally high IQ children, or that low IQ parents can not produce high IQ offspring... there is a certain amount of chance on the DNA dice roll on IQ potential. These children are often smarter then their parents, their teachers or the administrators combined. These children learn quickly how to manipulate the punishment system of a school district to get out of doing school work, going to school and often to get what they want. Being children they just want to play. The system has no place for super smart children. Show me a public school system that regularly graduates 12-16 year olds from High School. No school district is motivated to get children out to college as fast as possible because that is lost money to their limited way of thinking, they are however motivated to keep children in desks as long as possible even if it means atrophying their learning capabilities.  

Segregation is also being achieved using many methods that are disguised as something else in my opinion. I have met a surprising number of racist people (of many different races) in education.

So yes the education system could either through malicious manipulation, apathy or crazy "good intentions" be used by a few people to achieve other goals.  

After my son was left black and blue by a teacher and I was confronting the school over it... one educator told me the purpose of school was to teach my child to be obedient for the workforce and that because my children would question authority and corrected teachers they belonged in jail... so don't ask questions kids or correct authority figures 'cause that is a sign of a criminally inclined mind don't you know & it might justify an injury.

I crunched the statistics with the AP students my senior year and we concluded our HS was rigging the yearly fed test... here is what they where doing:

In your Freshmen year you are randomly chosen for the test, but interestedly the students that received grades in the A-B range % on that test would be asked to take the test the next year with the only people new added "randomly chosen" students not pulled from the C,D,F testers of the previous year, but students who had not been tested but did coincidentally have a GPA in the A-B range... but it could all be chance right? No because in our Junior Year again only children that scored A-B from the previous year where taking the test again and our HS had just received an additional 1000 or so students at the beginning of the school year from another HS, and there was none of these new kids being tested except in the Freshmen Class... which meant they where padding the test results with students that they knew performed well on the test, which got easier not harder as it always repeated some questions from the previous tests plus new questions... so by our Senior Year those of us who had been "randomly chosen" knew it was statistically improbable, so we refused to be part of that test pool. The HS did not do so well that year for the Senior test results as every senior AP student was in the pool along with a lot of regular students like myself who breezed through that test 3 years previously. Yes we got threatened for our refusal. But no HS is going to get away with expelling all their A-B students in their senior year without all hell breaking loose on the grounds they can not refuse to take a test that has nothing to do with their graduation, college entrance, or classes they are taking... and every single one of us was very openly stating our HS administration was cheating on a Federal Test and we had data. Needless to say we got in to no trouble when they figured out the potential scandal for punishing us would probably result in them loosing their jobs and a federal investigation.