What conservatives fail to mention when praising Reagan is that he failed to balance the budget. In fact the deficit expanded under Reagan. Higher deficits help ease the pain of the higher interest rates necessary to get inflation down. Higher deficits also helped lower the unemployment rate. But all of this was a trade off. When Reagan bragged "two out of three ain't bad" he was basically bullshitting the American public by pretending that he had actually solved some economic problems instead of just trading lower inflation and unemployment for a higher national debt.

The ideas that schools need more competition is also nonsense. Conservatives have never approved of public education, they'd rather spend their own money on their own children and to hell with everyone else. The reason the schools are mediocre is because the students are mediocre. No better than average in fact. And the children will always be average because that's the way math works. Trying to turn all our kids into genetic engineers or software designers won't work when half the kids have an IQ below 100. And no matter how many engineers we crank out, no one will hire them if Chinese engineers can do the same job for 1/10 the cost. This is the problem we need to face up to, not some silly criticism of public education.