Well, “a” problem, but I think a lot of the various problems stem from this one.
Consider operant conditioning. As a quick summary, it’s how organisms behavior is modified in response to stimulus. Behaviors that are associated with a “good” stimulus become more common and behaviors that are associated with a “bad” stimulus become less common.
It worked on rats in B. F, Skinner’s experiments. It works on people in general (although there are always a few stubborn cusses that will push hard against such conditioning, at least when it’s blatant). And I submit that it works on institutions.
Now consider that in the context of an educational bureaucracy. The stimulus is money. For a long time most of the time the folk who find reasons (however sincerely believed) why they “need” more money were rewarded with more money. Need computers? more money. Need more teachers so we can have smaller classes? More money. “Need” sports facilities and a coach so we can have a winning football team? More money. New textbooks for the latest educational theory to come down the pike? More money.
And what happens to someone who is frugal and comes in under budget? There’s a saying about budgets in bureaucracies: use it or lose it. Reward is based on coming up with reasons why the kids aren’t learning what they ought (or why the schools should be “teaching” even more things even though they aren’t teaching the basic skills the schools were created for in the first place). It is not based on how well the kids are actually learning.
For a long time we, as a society, have been rewarding the educational industrial complex for excuses for failure rather than for success. It doesn’t even require any dishonesty. People who honestly believe that this is the reason why the kids aren’t learning or that is important enough to take time away from “three ‘r'” work are rewarded. Folk who say “we need to go back to what works” or “we’re trying to do too much, we need to cut back to basics, get that right, and then think about what’s most important to add without losing those basics”…aren’t.
And the ones who are rewarded end up in positions of power and influence within the education-industrial complex. It’s the Iron Law of Bureaucracy at a nutshell.
We’ve been rewarding excuses for failure and penalizing success. As a result we get more excuses for failure and less success. Exactly the opposite of what we should be doing: rewarding success and penalizing failure, regardless of what excuses are presented for that failure.
Operant conditioning at work.
The Writer in Black 
Rewarding people based on need (children don’t learn), rather than delivering a desired good (children learn) usually works poorly.
That said, I think the problems in education are much more fundamental. Just ask people “What should be the purpose of education?” and you’ll probably observe there’s little agreement about the answer, much less about how to accomplish that purpose.
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It always felt to me, that past primary school, it was all just busy work, conditioning and mind control that had little to nothing to do with actually teaching kids anything practical. I take exception with subjects like English (in an English speaking nation). That really is a relevant subject, especially when we consider how many people are basically illiterate. It’s also interesting to note how many hours kids spend each day in school in the states compared to Germany, for instance. It’s pretty much all day, like a full time job in the states, whereas in Germany school hours run from around 7ish to 1. Sitting in a class room all day every day just squashes kid’s imagination, in my opinion. If it were legal in Germany, I would homeschool my daughter when she is old enough to start school.
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There was a $7 billion program to improve education results that seems to have no significant improvement. Everybody wants improvement. Getting the same results by spending $3 billion or by spending $10 billion should mean that most folks choose to spend only $3 billion — but in fact, the desire to “do better” leads most folks to support useless spending of gov’t, that is Other People’s Money, even if it doesn’t really help.
The idea of NOT spending, not wasting, seems too easy to translate into “not caring”.
I don’t yet know of any program that pays K-12 children for better test results, but I’d guess there would be huge improvement if more got more cash for more good tests.
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