I'm not trying to say that the US educational performance is great, just that it's not terrible. I think there's a lot of room for improvement, but there's a narrative that US schools are failing horribly and that just isn't true.

Wouldn't you agree that "failing" is relative? Given just how much money the US has, wouldn't you agree that we should expect better outcomes? Wouldn't it be a failure that despite our massive wealth, we are below OECD average in any subject?

That is a _huge_ shift of the goalpost from "US is worse than third world countries"

Wildly shifting goal posts from “worse than third world” to “above average isn’t good enough”

Particularly so given how "wealthy" the US is.