It's not like the kids get one teacher their whole life, every kid going through the public school system will have dozens of teachers and the affect of any single good or bad teacher averages out.
Could public schools be better? Yes, absolutely. We do not fund them enough, the fact that so many of my friends send their kids to private schools despite the enormous cost is testament to that. I have leaned on private schools myself for pre-K, transitional K, and earlier because its support is quite spotty across the USA.
> It's not like the kids get one teacher their whole life, every kid going through the public school system will have dozens of teachers and the affect of any single good or bad teacher averages out.
"averages out" - No, it may not.
I had the same teacher for 4th and 6th grade in elementary school. I thought she was great. A friend of mine _changed schools_ so she wouldn't have the teacher again, because the teacher had been verbally abusive to her. I never saw it, but it was a big deal to her.
A year later, I had a teacher who would _publicly_ ridicule and harass me. Sure, I only had to deal with that for one class and homeroom everyday for TEN MONTHS, no big deal, right?
My other teachers weren't like that. But one is enough.
My anecdotal experience as a parent is that there are far more teachers like that now. (The students are often worse, too, which may be one factor.) To write off abuse from a) persons in authority and b) government employees as "oh the kids will get over it" isn't just wrong, it's demeaning.
Teachers that harass students have no business being teachers at all. To the extent this is systemic, if a kid is stuck with an abusive parent who decides to homeschool, they get to deal with that their entire childhood. You can fire bad teachers but not bad parents.
And that's why you home-school: you don't want the education that your children receive depend on the school's choice of the teacher for your child.