Also, Germany is one of the countries ranked above us. Public education in Germany is pretty much entirely remanded to their 16 city-states and area states. I don’t think their federal government plays much, if any, role in these things you’ve mentioned.
I think this issue is much more complicated than just thinking local=good, centralized=bad when it comes to education. Re Germany, I'm not sure any of us have enough knowledge of the German system to be able to say it's a more localized system than the US's. But even if so, that doesn't support your notion that the best unit of govt to handle education is a localized district like a school board.
And the UK has a national system and they have 68 million people. Much bigger than any US state. And they're doing better than the US on that scale.
Of course, the averages here might hide a lot of what is causing this and what is salient. The fact is, we don't have the same demographics as those other countries, the same wealth disparities, social welfare opportunities, etc.
I don't think it's a matter of local v. centralized on many education issues: it's a matter of picking the right curriculum, focusing on educational methods as opposed to idealogy, and tracking kids appropriately. An example: the SAT and the AP courses are nationalized evaluation methods, and the AP courses have created a nationwide standard curriculum for US high school students with a lot of rigor. I think they're also highly successful.
A consideration: if you are in a locality with a good school system, you have a tendency to believe it must be due to local decisionmaking, and so that should be the way. If you are in a locality with a poor school system, you might think much differently.
en.m.wikipedia.org