1. Many Americans have trouble putting together a coherent sentence in English. What’ the hiddush?
2. Many Americans can’t do basic math without a calculator.
3. Many Americans are amazingly ignorant about science, social sciences and history.
4. Except for new immigrants and occasionally their children’s, Americans are infamously monolingual.
5. Almost all jobs for which a “fancy” secular education prepares you are closed to frum Yidden – even the modern Orthodox with their good secular educations are often forced to act secular to function in the workplace (consider people such as Jack Lew and Joe Lieberman who had to take off yarmulkes and adopt goyish names,among other things, in order to function – as Yaakov Lew or Yosef Lieberman, with beard and pe’os, we would never have heard of them).
Could we make our schools more cost effective? Probably. Class size should be increased, students should attend local schools they can walk to, and we should make use of existing shuls and cut back on dedicated and costly buildings. We can probably make use of distance education technology, especially for secular subject, with supervision. Boarding schools should only be for students from remote regions to small to support their own schools.
But the bottom line is that we are doing better than many if not most public (non-charter) schools in producing graduates who can support themselves. If the bigots attacking our schools were to apply the same standards to the government’s schools, they would be forced to start closing them down (perhaps outsourcing to private or charter schools). And we know from experience that if you focus on secular studies, you will have an “OTD” rate in excess of 90% (and at this point, it appears that over 99% of those Jews (defined by halacha) who attend secular schools are not Shabbos-observant by any halachic standard).