> I think this is because Asian governments want their populations to more educated and American governments want their populations to be less educated.

On the American side it’s not that they want people to be less educated. It’s the adversarial system of education being run by people whose interests are not aligned with students excelling.

Teacher’s unions, which predominantly exist in the public school system, are not in the business of educating children. They’re in the business of raising costs (their salaries and benefits) and lowering requirements (the work they actually have to do). They’re against measuring progress. They’re against firing for lack of progress.

Compare that to a private system where you only stay employed if you’re actually doing a good job of educating kids. There’s also the advantage of private schools being able to fire their students, but that’s more of an anti-disruption thing.