According to that report the important factors are student and teacher discipline and school atmosphere, and on can easily understand why all of these might be better in an affluent suburb.
Sure, but we’re talking about what explains variation between school districts in the same state in the US, not variation among OECD countries. I'm not saying that education policy and practice can't have a difference and doesn't globally, I'm saying there is virtually no evidence that the difference within districts that people in the US might be choosing between is driven by much of anything beyond background.
Do you think smart people would bother to spend a fortune on education (either directly via private schooling or indirectly by housing) if the school didn't matter? Follow the money, not the rhetoric.
More directly I have spent sometime helping out in different schools and I have seen with my own eyes the consequences of a single disruptive child on the learning environment - all the teachers time is sucked out dealing with this one student. I can't imagine trying to teach in a classroom with 3 or 4 disruptive students.
Yes, because smart and well informed are not the same thing, and even smart people who have access to systematic information are not immune to dismissing that information due to cognitive biases, particularly confirmation bias.
Quality of school district is also a well worn socially acceptable cover for avoiding proximity to those disliked for reasons of race or class, and smart people can still be racist and/or classist, and are more, not less, likely to seek socially acceptable cover for that.
The evidence doesn't really support that, though; students in a “bad” district don't have worse performance than students with similar background in a “better” district (whether because of distraction or any other reason), “better” districts just have more students with backgrounds which are correlated with educational success, of which the strongest factor is parental education.