For as long as it has existed, the USA has maintained separate categories of governance with limitations that ensure local and state control over certain areas.
The constitution makes clear (to me, but I'm not a constitutional scholar) that the federal government has specific enumerated responsibilities, everything else is up to the states and local governments. The benefit of this is it allows competition of ideas for governance between the states, which occasionally reveals alternatives that aren't always apparent. (For example, the disparate state wide regulations put in place to mitigate the impact of Covid. Why are the states doing things so differently?)
Unfortunately, there are big differences between schools across the country and the federal government has tried to get involved, despite the constitution. To work around the constitution the feds use now commonly employed methods like spreading federal tax money around to fund federally regulated programs in state and local school programs. It might be better if the country didn't have to be so indirect about it and could simply impose a uniform educational system, but this would require a titanic effort to overcome state's rights types of constitutional challenges.
Is it really just a money problem for schools? I don't think so. Baltimore public schools are notoriously bad, but spend well over the national average per pupil.
The Leander Independent School District is nearby to me. It is ranked 12th among 1,018 Texas school districts. It's an excellent school district. It has a 97% graduation rate and an average SAT score of 1230 while the Texas wide average is 1022. This school district spends $11,496 per pupil, which is below the national average of $12,239, see [1].
It seems that without spending more we could do much better by emulating the Leander Independent School District and ensuring that instead of $12,239 being the national average spending make it the national minimum spending per pupil.
Parents willing to spend even more could still move those districts that spend twice as much per pupil, but we should strive to give all students the benefits of a school district like the Leander Independent School District.
If you are referencing property taxes funding schools, you should know that it actually only funds about half of total school funding. The other half comes from federal and state governments and the way they give out funding is to selectively counteract that misallocation such that 47 states actually allocate more per-student funding to poor areas than to wealthier ones and according to this article [0], it has been this way since at least 1995.
I said state and federal: "Considering federal, state, and local funding, almost all states allocate more per-student funding to poor kids than to nonpoor kids, though only a few—Alaska, New Jersey, and Ohio—are highly progressive. A handful—Nevada, Wyoming, and Illinois—are weakly regressive, and the majority have a weakly progressive distribution of funding to poor versus nonpoor students."
The critically important part of their method is funding of schools being independent from wealth of the kids’ parents.
I’m not sure US can adopt that; American voters view that method as communism.