Not trying to be antagonistic, but aren’t you kind of proving the point? You've shown the US funding for education is good, it’s comparable with other countries that have good education systems, but the results seem to be poorer. (I guess that’s what people are saying but I haven’t verified that myself.) Thus there seems to be inefficiency in how that funding is allocated/used compared to other countries. So increasing funding doesn’t seem necessary. But improving the system that uses that funding through the measures you’ve rightly identified seems... well obvious at this point. (And those points you've identified IMO are key to improving a lot of the broken systems we talk about.)

As anecdata about this misallocation in US education funding: I come from another part of the world (a first world country), and something that I have not, for the life of me, been able to reconcile with the funding arguments is the stupendous sports facilities that most schools have. High schools in the US have sports stadiums bigger than many cities where I come from. If there were a real funding problem in an education system, sports should be the first thing to downsize in order to protect the core mission. But the priorities are just not aligned right for education.