Raq
The quality of education in public schools in the US far exceeds that of public schools anywhere else I've lived
I'm not sure we do in fact educate our people better than any other country in the world or even as well. My subjective experience is that your average person from the wealthier European nations (Germany, France, even to some extent the U.K. ) is better educated than your average USAian. Not that there are not plenty of both the ignorant and well educated everywhere ; it is just my experience that the Eurpeans skew a bit more educated than we do. Statistics do seem to support this to some extent; though mostly of a fairly iffy type. The U.S. seems to get slightly lower test scores; and there are a whole bunch of caveats on concluding anything from test scores - especially across countries. A lower percentage of the U.S. enjoys reading for pleasure than Western Europe and Scandanaiva. And that, to me, is harder to argue with.
However there are a number of reasons for this, and I doubt the teacher quality is one of them. Probably the biggest factor, and the one that seems to be paid the least attention to, is that U.S. kids spend less time in school than anybody. We have that Summer Vaction left over from when kids had to take summer off to help their parents on the farm. So fewer hourse learning, less learning takes place - a pretty big difference. Another is funding; many other countries fund a larger part of their kids education nationally; but in fact many nations still end up with big differences between both schools and funding of schools. It seems like equal funding of public education that ends up happening in a lot of places. Don't know if teachers outside the U.S. are subject to less bureacracy than inside. I know it is no-where close to zero anywhere. So I'm still guessing that the big differences are simple time in school with maybe some big differences in level and amount of inequality in funding.
Raq, does you experience include other rich countries, or only nations that were a lot poorer than the U.S./French/UK/W. European standard. Cause I admit you have a lot more personal experience than I do.