The US educational system needs to be improved, but a lot of the problem relates to the socio-cultural problems in society whereby it's very difficult to actually teach and maintain order in some schools. While lots of children are not properly prepared for school and learning. The downfall of stable two-parent families has a lot to do with this. I really haven't kept up with educational challenges in the US much the past decade or two, but they used to say that free nursery school or kindergarten advances life-long learning significantly.
Sidenote: I've always thought that the ascendancy of rap and lyric-based music meant that you could teach young people poetry and poetics, including fundamentals such as meter and rhyme and other techniques to express themselves in that genre -- alliteration, internal rhyme, rhyme schemes, synecdoche, metonymy, false rhymes, etc.
If you teach them the techniques of poetry and an understanding of poetics combined with writing their own lyrics/poetry, i think this could be popular and useful learning.
In what ways would that be useful? Popular perhaps, but useful?
Look, real education is about deciding what to teach. It's deciding what the learner truly wants to learn, and finding ways to assist the learner to define and then develop his/her/them's innate interests, talents, and natural tendencies.
So, for the students who are interested in developing their language skills, fine, teach "poetics". But for the students who would rather explore mathematics, or movement, or embrace music, we should provide the opportunities for them to develop that interest and explore their
own possibilities, not the possibilities that you are attempting to define for them.