There are many bad public schools - but it seems a bit hyperbolic to say the average public school is "horrible".

I guess it depends on how you measure it. If we go by percent of kids meeting the standards and a passing grade being 70%, you could justifiable say the schools are horrible on average.

Agreed. I could have phrased that better.

40% of American adults can't do basic arithmetic[0], which seems like a disaster to me. 88% are apparently incapable of doing things like reading a simple table or comparing two documents and identifying sentences that express the same ideas between them[1][2]. Over 50% apparently can't scroll through a list of information about books and identify the author of a specific book they're told to find.

[0] https://phys.org/news/2018-03-high-adults-unable-basic-mathe...

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp

[2] https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp?section=1&sub_...

Please tell me, at least the animals were just donkeys and elephants