However, overall I'd say that our educational system has devolved into nothing more than daycare

Wonderfully put !

However, I don't think it's the fault of the teachers or schools entirely. The parents also have a lot to do with it.
See, when I was in school, a teacher was still a person for whom there was respect (that wasn't even that long ago, say 10-15 years). Now that seems to be completely gone. I've got a few uncles that teach, all in the higher education department. There are some of the most demotivated people I've ever seen in my life and they all long for the day of their retirement (though some even got more than ten years to go)

They've told me stories that I found so hard to believe that they had to be true. One of the best (and therefor one of the most tragic) is still that they can't really afford to fail students anymore. If they do this now, they risk the that the parents of the kid come to school with their lawyer (I kid you not!) to "talk" about the kid's bad grades ! Of course, it's always the teacher's fault according to the parents. Their kid is such a sweet boy/girl, it's simply not possible that it got such bad grades because it was too lazy to lift a finger of schoolwork throughout the enire year.

In my days (god I feel like an old fart when I say that!) when I got a bad grade or I got some sort of school punishment I could expect a lot of trouble when I got home. Most of the time I had to do the "assignment" twice : once for the teacher and once for my parents. I've cursed a lot in those days , but looking back at it that wasn't too bad a system. Now most of the times when a kid gets punished by a teacher, their parents tell it that it doesn't have to do the assignment, so it doesn't. There's very little teachers can do about that.