I won't get into personal family matters with you, hope you understand. Let's just pretend I don't have one and I'm only speaking for myself.
I graduated top 10 in my class, won awards and scholarships, yet my freshman year I had my ass handed to me by kids that were from private schools and was within a hair of academic probation. Had no clue how to study, was never taught and it was never needed. 2 of my friends that were also in the top 20 dropped out because they were so far behind and transferred to community colleges. No, my school sucked in academics, but we had a helluva baseball team, our basketball court had the old scoreboard from cobo hall and our football field actually had turf instead of grass.
There was a decent public school system that bordered mine (same district) and the high school was actually closer than mine but I lived on the street that went to school X instead of Y. I was allowed to go to Y my senior year for calculus, but that's because my school didn't offer it. Over 100 schools in my county, I had the choice of exactly one.
Nope, the system we have in place is sick and we just keep piling on cough syrup to fix it.