I have to disagree with that. Schools like your daughter's are the exception, not the rule. Heck, take a look at the Houston Independant School District, one of the largest school districts in the country. Their flagship school is the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, and HISD brags about how HSPVA grads consistently score 30 points higher on average on each segment of the SAT. Sounds really good until you find out that the segment average for HISD is 500, which absolutely sucks.
Your daughter, at 8th grade, will probably outscore the average HISD graduating senior.
I've spent some time looking around the National Center for Education Statistics website trying to get some perspective and I've come to a couple of conclusions. I'm not an expert on this topic, so I'm open to correction. But for what it's worth, the impression I have is this:
First, we're pretty much right in there with the rest of the world. Based on the statistics I could find, we're slightly ahead in some areas and slightly behind. This was a nice summary document that leads into more detailed stats:
http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2011034
The gist of it is that we're slightly behind in math, but not by much.
Regarding the SAT scores, I don't know what the national average is to give some sense of where Houston falls. Frankly, though, the stats I'm interested in are drop out percentages, literacy rates and functional math.
After this, I wonder what's available. When I was a student at Garfield HS in Seattle, I took full responsibility for my failure. I skipped an average of about 10 classes per week, and spent more time at night school than at day school in order to graduate on time. Even as they offered at the time a terrific biology program and had all sorts of AP classes and more than its share of national merit scholars, I squeaked through with a 1.7 GPA (technically only possible because night school classes were pass/fail.)
In an urban area, the challenges are going to be different than in a rural area, and I'd be wary of putting the onus of responsibility only on the school district. Parents have to share responsibility for student success and at some point, as they approach graduation and adulthood, the students themselves need to step up and accept responsibility for their own success or failure.
Ultimately, the main point I was making before is that the way public schools are set up, they're funded up and down at all levels of government, each operating independently with significant latitude to do things their own way. There are federal and state guidelines, and there are budget constraints, but from town to town, district to district, public schools in one area looks very different than in another. Most, however, have good programs available to students who take advantage of them including accelerated learning classes and such. But saying that public schools are broken or failing is specious. There are tons and tons of kids graduating each year who are well prepared for college, the military, a trade apprenticeship or whatever their next chapter might be.
