No and yes.
It depends on where you are looking at it from. What is broken is uniform access of students across the nation to a quality public education. American public schools range in quality from excellent to abysmal. I heard a commentator recently divide public schools into two groups: those that range from fairly good up to excellent, and those that range from barely adequate down to awful. The problem is not that some schools are better than others; that is a statistical imperative. Not all the children can be above average, nor can all the schools. The problem is that the divide that separates them is so great.
Some of this divide (quite a bit of it, actually) comes down to a school’s access to resources. Some states’ legislatures fund their school systems more than others, whether this is due to the limits of the state’s available funds or the legislature’s priorities for what funds shall be spent on. Some school districts are “richer” than others, that is, they have better tax bases. They can afford better facilities, better equipped, with better paid staff. And these things are important; kids respond to their environment. I don’t know how you solve for this unless more uniform funding comes from the state or the federal government, and that has serious implications for local control of the schools. This is a problem that cannot be solved from within the school system. It is at root a political problem, primarily at the state level, ultimately the government’s problem to solve, and solutions may prove politically unpalatable.
Of course some schools and school districts are better run than others. Some are better staffed. That is a separate problem, but often related. It is a problem that is often susceptible, partially at least, to local action. It too can be regarded as a political problem.
But often “good” schools and “bad” schools are allowed to exist within the same district. This is almost always a local issue, a matter of how the board of trustees chooses to distribute its resources. Not all of the districts children are treated equitably and even-handedly, although they are governed by the same school board and the same district administrators. This is a local political issue, how the district chooses to distribute resources. The more prosperous parts of the district have the better schools. These parents are more likely to be politically active and to have more “clout” with the school board, to be taken more seriously. These parents would not tolerate in “their” schools conditions and practices that are allowed to persist in the “bad” schools in the same district. The “bad” schools are often run differently, with different expectations for students and staff, and far different outcomes for students. This is where American public education is broken. To allow good schools and bad to exist both in the same district is unconscionable. Jonathan Kozol wrote a book about this state of affairs: Savage Inequalities (1992). It seems that not much has changed since then.
The Reformist agenda, as exemplified by Idaho’s “Luna Laws,” do little to address the problem.