I think there are different ways to go with this, none of them wrong.
--You could look for a school of a different flavor. Even the most awesome school is not awesome if it does not fit the actual kid you have. You would have to start over negotiating about curriculum, etc., but you are experienced at that.
--You could just accept that the skill of complying with instruction is something she's building, and it isn't that much fun, but that in the long term, she'll be happier for knowing it. We have gone this route for phases of our history, always making sure there's enough joy in other parts of the day to make it livable as an overall thing. We are not sorry we built this skill.
No situation is perfect, and I do not think parents are obligated to render a schooling situation even close to perfect. Sometimes you have to decide what's "good enough." And I am just making sure you know that you are an excellent parent and your DD will turn out fine whether or not you choose to change up the situation.
This.
I'm also going to suggest that you could also look at cyberschooling as a
credentialing step-- one that preserves that need to learn compliance, but doesn't come with a crushing load of "you have to be doing A, B, or C between the hours of 8 and 3 each day."
This wound up being flexible enough to work tolerably well for DD15 until she basically outgrew it at about 13yo. Attendance hours? Um-- well, don't ask don't tell, if you see what I mean. We told them that DD spent the requisite time doing school, the school was happy, the state was happy, and none of them any the wiser that this estimate was about 200-250% of the actual time required, and DD got time to do more interesting things, including just being her chronological age. She spent a lot of time with me-- professionally, that included a lot of time in your work environment, too, btw. In retrospect, being utterly comfortable and familiar with a collegiate environment was no small thing to a PG child, since she is able to move with an ease on campus that belies her actual chronological age as a starting college student still in her early teens.
She is VERY stubborn and strong-willed. It was definitely not the easiest thing for her to learn to submit to doing things someone else's way-- but as I'm quite sure that you appreciate in your occupation, Megmeg, there is also a need to learn that set of skills. I won't say that I don't still have a certain regret for not being able to outsource that particular set of learning challenges. {ahem}
However, she did learn a great deal in terms of how to navigate college independently, and there was a nice way to continuously sort of benchmark her readiness in terms of not only academic readiness, but also executive function, maturity, etc.
