I graduated from a small, rural, grades 1-12 public school in 1960. Most of the male teachers were WWII or Korean War vets. Most of the female teachers were married to these men. Almost every one of my classmates came from two-parent homes. There was no Kindergarten, Head Start, or Special Ed. We had one, each, football, basketball, and baseball coach.
I take it back...there was a Head Start program...one of my cousins, several years younger, got to start school in the third grade because he'd already done the material in the lower grades...his brother brought him home an extra copy of the lessons every day.
Except for two years on the East Coast, my kids went to public school. Virginia had just started the exit test system when we were there; they gave the proposed exit test to the teachers in the local public system and almost half of them failed it.
After a military career, my second career was teaching JH and HS Science, 10 years of which was in the school I had graduated from. A vast difference 35 years later: feel-good programs, revisionist history, dumbed-down math and science, up to 30% of the students in the classes were subnormals who could not learn the material but were there anyway, no vo-tech training, etc. Many of my former teachers were still around and active in the community; most of them told me they would not have taught under the then-current system. I gave it a try but retired from it at the earliest opportunity.