The fundamental problem with these types of analysis is that it is the aggregate and average of a large mostly sparse country with a large population. Between Federalism, local & state politics, wealth concentration, and geographic constraint leads to some interesting and costly quirks to our school systems.

It turns out that wealthy public school districts are extremely good and compete at the top of the world stage, and poor school districts are really, really, terrible and underperform on the world stage by a substantial margin.

Could you support this with data of your own? I know that applies to university level education, but I've never seen the data for lower levels of education.

But we are top of the charts in percent overhead. USA! USA!