As the vast majority of US children are not homeschooled, it's not relevant to the broader discussion. In anycase homeschooling is typically encountered in a religious setting, or remote locations.
Education is already a family matter, children whose parents provide a home environment conducive to learning will learn better, it's an inevitability. The tragedy is that such an environment is usually beyond the means of less wealthy parents, or beyond the abilities of those less-well educated. The solution of course, is good public schools (though the home learner will still be top of the class).
EDIT: I'm British, we have 28 days holiday and overwork is perfectly acceptable here. Our schools are doing poorly because of a mediocre and highly proscriptive curriculum which has reduced the job to spoon-feeding photocopied worksheets, and puts off anyone intelligent from becoming a teacher (the pay is awful too). This is compounded by a severe over-dependence on standardised testing which has further reduced the job to spoon-feeding only the photocopied worksheet required to pass the next test, and resulted in massive grade inflation for over a decade. Rote learning is the only lending, and there is little to no actual understanding anymore. But people think that the government should fix education, as it is a public endeavour, even if this means admitting that the government don't have a clue and simply using public money to fund private schools (see Charter Schools) which is the latest experiment, and so far seem to be working.
To your point, you will find this paper interesting:
Europeans Work To Live And Americans Live To Work
http://people.hmdc.harvard.edu/~akozaryn/myweb/docs/final_wo...
Abstract:
This paper compares the working hours and life satisfaction of Americans and Europeans using the World Values Survey, Eurobarometer and General Social Survey. The purpose is to explore the relationship between working hours and happiness in Europe and America. Previous research on the topic does not test the premise that working more makes Americans happier than Europeans. The findings suggest that Americans may be happier working more because they believe more than Europeans do that hard work is associated with success.
But where there is active entrepreneurship in the US in this field, most of Scandinavia is copycatting others or developing government plans on how to improve education per. the PISA measurement scale.
The Scandinavian model is known for it's group oriented focus on learning where the new discussion is whether this is the right approach.
Among other things especially the tiger mom revolution from china is a big discussion and Canadas education system is very popular.
Finland seems to be the only Scandinavian country that is doing exceptionally well on the PISA scale.
My own personal believe is that there are to basic reasons why the quality of education seems to go down is.
1) Still too much focus on "learning by heart". It's obvious that you need to learn read, write and do basic calculation, but beyond that the most important thing to learn is, how to learn.
2) Parents outsources the job of raising their children to the pre-schools, kindergartens and so on. Forget about more money for education. If you can make parents more actively interested in their childrens education it will automatically raise the quality of the education they recieve.
More money for education is not going to solve those two fundamental problems.