Why do you think that the individual school districts have so much of a problem providing and equivalent educations when compared to other individual school districts that have much better outcomes with less funds, even controlling for cost of living?

I wonder if it has to do with the level of services expected and provided between locations, states, and counties.

For example, I know that special needs students, which can be notoriously expensive to educate.

Here's another data point, having looked at a few different US district budgets: Employee benefits are about 1/4 of the staffing budget. Those benefits include things like health care and pension that are part of national coverage in the rest of the OECD, but come out of the "education" budget in the US.

No. Nearly all OECD countries pay for health and pension insurance through payroll taxes. So a school in France would pay employer-side payroll taxes for a teacher, which would show up as education spending. And the teacher would pay the employee-side contribution from her salary, which itself would show up as education spending. (That is to say, “national coverage” in most European countries doesn’t work how Americans think it works, which seems to be that health benefits for middle class people are paid for through income taxes on rich people. If it did work like that, you’d be right, but pretty much only Denmark does that. See: http://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/taxing-wages-france.pdf. Look at France. About 25% of the total cost of an employee to an employer, such as a school, is employer-side social security taxes—the OECD’s term for payroll taxes for health and pension benefits.)

Moreover, many countries exempt teachers from the national pension scheme, just like the US. The UK, which I used as an example above, has a teacher pension system

I was with you up until here. Are you claiming that France does not have progressive income tax rates? This is certainly not the case. France has both a higher average tax wedge, as well as proportionally higher tx for high incomes.

French income tax maxes out at 45% on income above €157,807, while US federal income tax maxes out at 37% above $518,401

I spent some time digging into the London story. Here's some facts:

Spending levels are much higher than parent reported. [1] for one school chosen at random shows that their budget was almost 8000 GBP/pupil - over 30% higher than cited. Furthermore, 82% was staffing. A mere 3% is allocated to facilities.

In my local school district[2], salaries for all staff add up to a little less than 60% of the budget. Facilities (21.6%) and debt service (7.6%) are a far greater fraction of our costs.

In short, the "education is cheaper in London" story is a lie. Many of their costs are payed for by a different color of money entirely, and simply doesn't show up on the education budget.

[1] https://schools-financial-benchmarking.service.gov.uk/school...

[2] https://www.adams12.org/financial-services/documents/fiscal-...

The school you picked “at random” is a community academy, which is a special kind of charter school outside the regular school system, which may also receive outside funding. So that doesn’t contradict the numbers I posted, which are for regular public schools in London. Here is another chart that’s consistent with my numbers: https://dfemedia.blog.gov.uk/2019/10/11/school-funding-alloc...