http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2011/2011004_1.pdf (See tables R1 and R3, which give breakdowns of the PISA data you are citing.)
However, you might be right that knowledge of literacy is a problem - crime in the US does tend to be disproportionately committed by groups of people who have low averages on PISA literacy tests.
http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/26/48165173.pdf
After edit: I just saw this possibly relevant link in the local newspaper:
It was called "No Child Left Behind", and sadly is now overwhelmingly unpopular. The kind of disciplined (and occasionally rote) learning that leads to success in some of our peer nations is called "teaching to the test". Well-to-do parents don't like hearing that their children's school is "failing" just because poor children are being shuffled from grade to grade without learning much.
I really don't know what can be done. Money isn't the answer: Look at the DC public schools.
NCLB is set up to punish schools that don't meet their improvement goals. The schools, wary of being punished themselves, punish teachers whose students aren't meeting the goals.
While teachers are busy trying to teach basic math and language literacy to the bottom rung of the class, the students who could excel if they were challenged end up left behind.
For reasons beyond a teacher's control, a class may not meet the requirements, and the teacher is punished. You can look at a teacher's career and determine with reasonable accuracy whether the teacher is good, but looking at one or two year samples does not give the same accuracy. Yet that is exactly what NCLB encourages schools to do.
There was plenty I learned in grade school that standardized tests never tested. The optimal school and teacher strategy under NCLB is to strip out all that excess baggage and spend every waking moment figuring out how to get students to perform better only on what is tested.
I disagree with your notion that other countries are doing things right. They are doing things better, perhaps, or maybe the parents in other countries encourage students more not to give up when they're struggling with homework; the opposite of which is a major failing that seems to be common in America. An educational paradigm can be garbage but students will still learn more if it has support from parents.
Khan Academy's model or something even more radical is the direction all basic skills education needs to move toward. Teaching basic skills is critical, but they need to be taught in a way that both encourages under-performing students and that doesn't hold back better performing students. That's the only way to leave no child behind.
That is not simple and straightforward because powerful interest groups don't want education to be reformed along those lines. "The education system is a formalised, bureaucratic organisational structure and, like any bureaucratic organisational structure, it strives for maximum autonomy from external pressures as its cardinal principle of survival. While ostensibly devoted to the education of children, teachers, school administrators and local education officers must nevertheless regard parents acting on behalf of children as a force to be kept at bay because parental pressures in effect threaten the autonomy of the educational system. . . . I would hold that the stupefying conservatism of the educational system and its utter disdain of non-professional opinion is such that nothing less than a radical shake-up of the financing mechanism will do much to promote parental power." -- Mark Blaug, "Education Vouchers--It All Depends on What You Mean," in Economics of Privatization, J. Le Grand & R. Robinson, ed. (1985)
It would be a distinctly good idea, and would surely reduce crime rates, to reform education along the lines of ensuring that all pupils in schools in the United States learn fundamental literacy and numeracy. According to the PISA international education studies, some countries do much better than the United States in this regard.
http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/26/48165173.pdf
http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/50/9/49685503.pdf