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On the issue of property taxes and school funding, this varies by state. The state I'm in puts everything into one budget, subsidized with oil taxes, and funds the Title I (low income) schools more, but the better off schools make some of it up in better parent-teacher associations and less need for things like social workers.
There's probably a dynamic where better teachers like teaching better students, and will move to the charter or private or high income schools disproportionately. I'm not sure how big the effect of that is. The teachers having to spend all their energy on disruption and children who are behind is something that happens, and I'm not sure how big of an affect it has at normal ranges of children.
This probably varies a fair bit by child. There are some children (I've heard it's about 40%) who will learn to read competently based on the kind of exposure that it's almost impossible to avoid in the current society. My mom says she learned to read at three by her father reading the newspaper to her. There are other children who need explicit instruction in phonics, though I think most schools are back to teaching that so it's probably alright. I am not sending my own child to the school I work at because I am involved in workplace drama there, and don't want to get my kids pulled into that. But they'd still make friends and learn to read and add there, probably.
There are schools that are kind of a drag on kids' natural curiosity, which might be more of a long term problem, though I'm not sure if there's any research on that, or how to go about researching it.
R/teachers indicates that there's a lot of this going on, but how much of an effect 'better teachers' actually has seems very up in the air. Like part of Catholic school's secret sauce is surely that if you just cannot behave you are asked to leave(nicely at first, but to be reframed as Not A Request if needed) and a single misbehaving student can ruin things for everyone. But they also have better teachers(more experienced mostly, but also higher percentage of in-subject graduate degrees for high school teachers) and better instructional curricula(phonics over whole word etc). I'm not sure you can really distinguish the two effects, either- experienced teachers with masters degrees in their subjects strongly prefer teaching positions which exclude the bottom quintile as students.
This reminds me that it's probably a good idea to optimize for different things in primary vs secondary education. As far as I can tell, in lower elementary it's fine to do Montessori or Waldorf or unschooling or whatever else will deliver a pretty good childhood experience. The teachers should teach phonics, but otherwise it's mostly important for them to be able to get all the kids settled and not constantly bothering each other. There are a few elementary students who are so wild even a decent teacher can't get them to cooperate, but it's pretty rare.
Then in high school the quality of peers and academic ability of teachers becomes a lot more important.
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