The public schools don’t work for everyone and so parents have to know their kids and choose accordingly.

Absolutely! Parents need to figure out what will work best for them and for their children

These are intact families with just enough financial resources to have the mother stay at home, although for some it is a hard financial decision.

I know several couples that home school their children. Two of these couples actually have the father stay at home to do the home schooling because the mother actually makes more money.
I personally have no problem with the idea of home schooling kids and actually couldn’t agree more with your last two paragraphs above:

Our problems are extensive, systemic, and involve not so much the lack of money as the lack of vision about what public education can do, can’t do, should do, shouldn’t do, and these questions can only be answered by people who refuse to be enlightened by the social science data we now have that answers those questions.
It’s sad that the very institution–education–that purports to teach logical thinking and reason and science ignores the data we have and continues to pursue strategies that will fail again and again. Even Bill Gates has learned some hard truths that money is not the key.

However, I don’t think all public schools are doing a poor job of teaching our kids. Some public schools seem to do very well. Money may not be the only answer, but it is definitely part (to some degree) of the solution.

We used to be the best educated country in the world till the Republican party, backed by the for-profit home-school movement, stripped it of proper funding.

I’m from California, so I can’t speak to the funding of education in your state, but our funding problems started many decades ago when the state began collecting local tax dollars and then redistributing t those dollars to the localities of the state based on a complex formula. This was the result of the passage of our Prop 13, which held the line on how much property taxes could go up each year. Old people who owned their homes could no longer afford to stay in their homes because from year to year as the valuation of their homes precipitously increased so too did their property taxes. While most of the time it’s nice to know your home has increased in value, it’s really pretty useless if all you want to do is stay and live in that home, not sell it. Millions of older Californians could no longer keep up with the rate of increase of their property taxes; thus, Prop 13 was passed.
It had desired results for these home owners, but unintended consequences with regards to local control of schools. Perhaps if a state isn’t too large, it might not be bad if it has a great deal of control over the educational system, but in a state as large and diverse in needs from locale to locale as California, the bureaucracy that is our state government has destroyed our public school system and it happened long ago and has nothing to do even now with home-schooling.
Our problems are extensive, systemic, and involve not so much the lack of money as the lack of vision about what public education can do, can’t do, should do, shouldn’t do, and these questions can only be answered by people who refuse to be enlightened by the social science data we now have that answers those questions.
It’s sad that the very institution–education–that purports to teach logical thinking and reason and science ignores the data we have and continues to pursue strategies that will fail again and again. Even Bill Gates has learned some hard truths that money is not the key.