Summer vacation should be eliminated. A two week vacation in December is completely unnecessary. Weeklong breaks should coincide with grading periods, which is to say breaks should be used for grading and preparation of next semester's instructional material. Essentially school should be year round.
School start times must change to suit the biological sleep cycle of the students they serve. School must revolve around students not teachers or sports or the sleep cycle of adults.
Move to the European club model of sports rather than school sponsored sports. At the very least, sports which routinely cause serious head injuries, football and soccer, must not be allowed in an institution that purports to be concerned with the intellectual development of young people.
Make it mandatory that high schools provide shop classes.
Make it mandatory that high schools provide computer programming courses.
Make it mandatory that all pre-k, K, and grade schools must provide second language education as well as English acquisition classes for students whose parents do not speak English.
Provide a healthy breakfast and lunch for ALL students. Meals must be based on the glycemic index in order to give students the best performance possible.
Provide a pay differential for teachers, which is to say that math or computer science teachers should be paid more.
Students that make trouble in the classroom must be sequestered away from students that do not.
Mainstreaming students with special needs without sufficient support staff harms the bulk of students. Schools must hire more counselors, 504 and IEP specialists and speech language pathologists to support the needs of today's students.
Outlaw online education, as it harms underprivileged students the most.
And that's just coming off the top of my head. If the the above policies were followed, I'm confident our education system would see great gains, and our nation would benefit.
I can get behind a lot of this.
My kids, starting in K, had to be in the school at 7:30am. That's crazy. Especially since they stay till 3:10. That is significantly longer than I had to go at that age. We got out much earlier until 3rd or 4th grade I think. It's been a while. The most irritating part to me is that they still have homework. How? What are they doing all day that they still need to do things at home?
Teachers need to get paid and so do support staff. Running a school is difficult, even when the people that want to be there love it.
Breaks are necessary, but need to make sense. An entire summer off is dumb (makes them dumber too), but having a month off here and there makes much more sense. I've seen places that do two months on, two weeks off, and so on. It looks pretty great.
Another thing that schools don't really do is blocked classes. I liked it much nicer having class every other day rather than cramming everything into a single day.
There's a lot more, but our education system should be the envy of the world, just like every other aspect of our life should, but it isn't because too many people don't want to invest in our children.