PISA data, IQ, demographics

The below trend lines represent "dollars of spending per PISA point", fewer dollars spent per point, while still having a high average score, is the ideal. I wonder why the US has to spend nearly 21.7% more per point, yet still scores lower than the average European country.
https://i.imgur.com/wYw5ZUI.png

The most popular assumed cause for mediocre educational outcomes in the United States is a lack of spending. The US education system "needs to be improved" and the most consistent recommendation proposed to achieve this is to spend more.
Even a cursory look at the data calls this narrative into question: "In 2012, the United States spent $11,700 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student on elementary/secondary education, which was 31 percent higher than the OECD average of $9,000. At the post secondary level, the United States spent $26,600 per FTE student, which was 79 percent higher than the OECD average of $14,800."
Source: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp
Elementary and secondary education expenditure per FTE student:
https://i.imgur.com/G4NSwCC.gif
US spending is even further above average when looking at expenditure for post-secondary education (the rapid increase in the price of college in the US being a topic for another time):
http://i.imgur.com/ssRXGo2.gif
Several countries have better educational outcomes despite spending much less than the US, but exactly how much better are they doing?
https://i.imgur.com/oXEJTxQ.jpg
The above graph lists the mean scores on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for many countries. For those countries which there is information on expenditure per FTE student available, they are listed below (from least to greatest expenditure) with their respective PISA average:
Turkey: 448 ($2,784 spent per FTE student)
Mexico: 413 ($2,801)
Hungary: 477 ($4,371)
Chile: 423 ($4,522)
Slovak Republic: 482 ($5,231)
Israel: 466 ($6,325)
Estonia: 521 ($6,334)
Czech Republic: 499 ($6,419)
Poland: 518 ($6,764)
Portugal: 487 ($7,444)
Korea: 554 ($7,934)
Spain: 484 ($8,152)
New Zealand: 500 ($8,445)
Italy: 485 ($8,450)
Slovenia: 501 ($8,457)
Australia: 504 ($8,790)
Iceland: 493 ($9,333)
France: 495 ($9,338)
Finland: 519 ($9,353)
Japan: 536 ($9,408)
Germany: 514 ($9,843)
Ireland: 501 ($9,893)
United Kingdom: 494 ($10,056)
Netherlands: 523 ($10,464)
Sweden: 478 ($10,652)
Denmark: 500 ($10,780)
Belgium: 515 ($11,007)
United States: 481 ($11,732)
Austria: 506 ($12,164)
Norway: 489 ($13,611)
Switzerland: 531 ($15,512)
Luxembourg (population of only 543,202 as of 2013): 490 ($20,153)
Raw data used to sort by expenditure: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d15/tables/dt15_605.10.asp
Though their educational expenditures are not readily available from the OECD, here are the mean PISA scores (2012) for the remaining countries by region:
Asia: Shanghai-China 613, Singapore 573, Hong Kong 561, Chinese Taipei 560, Macao-China 538, Vietnam 511, Kazakhstan 432, Thailand 427, Malaysia 421, Indonesia 375,
Europe: Latvia 491, Russian Federation 482, Lithuania 479, Croatia 471, , Serbia 449, Romania 445, Bulgaria 439, Montenegro 410, Albania 394,
South/Central America: Uruguay 409, Costa Rica 407, Brazil 391, Argentina 388, Colombia 376, Qatar 376, Peru 368
Middle East/North Africa: Tunisia 388, United Arab Emirates 434, Jordan 386,

Why do Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, UK, Ireland, Germany, Japan, Finland, France, Iceland, Australia, Slovenia, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, Korea, Portugal, Poland, Czech Republic, Estonia, and Slovak Republic have, as a group, a significantly higher PISA average than the United States, despite their significantly lower expenditures?

Why does Luxembourg spend 2.54 dollars for every dollar Korea does (per student) but still have a PISA average that is 64 points lower (11.6% lower)? Is primary education and secondary education actually 11.6% "poorer" in Luxembourg than in Japan despite Luxembourg's stunningly disproportionate spending? Is the PISA test systematically biased in favor of Japanese students?

Why does Chile spend marginally more per pupil than Hungary yet have an average that is 54 points lower?

How does Vietnam have a nominal per capita GDP of $2,371 ($6,377 per capita taking into account Purchasing Power Parity) and outscore the US which has a per capita income of $57,220? Note that American blacks still have a per capita income which is still approximately 11.3 times higher than nominal Vietnamese per capita GDP.

Why does Japan, which spends $9,408 per FTE student, have a PISA average that is:
-5 points higher than Switzerland (which expends $6,104 more/student)
-47 points higher than Norway (which expends $4,200 more per student)
-20 points higher than Austria (which expends $2,756 more per student)
-55 points higher than the United States (which expends ~$2,324 more per student)

Is there a parsimonious explanation which can consistently predict if a given country will have PISA scores which are abnormally low or high relative to its expenditures per student?

There is indeed a theory which will, almost without exception, consistently predict all "inconsistencies" in the relationship between expenditure and educational outcomes for different nations. This revolutionary theory can be summarized as the following:

Different groups of people are different.

People are different, not just in their experience, but in their biology, men are not born with the same innate capacities. If this is granted, that genetically distinct people are innately different (which is clear from any twin study), then it is deductively true that genetically distinct peoples will differ as well, the only question is the degree to which these differences are significant. Before pushing this line of thinking any further, consider again the absolute highest PISA scoring countries:
Shanghai-China, Singapore, Hong Kong-China, Chinese Taipei (Taiwan), Korea, Macao-China, Japan.

All East Asian, could that be just a coincidence? East Asia is the region of the world with the highest average IQ, and this can't be dismissed by mere differences in effort, as East Asians maintain a well above average IQ after being adopted by White parents.
http://thealternativehypothesis.org/index.php/2016/04/15/iqs-of-east-asians/

Those skeptical of the premise that any meaningful test of "intelligence" could even exist, or that IQ tests measure anything significant, should reference this article as well.
http://thealternativehypothesis.org/index.php/2016/04/15/the-validity-of-iq/

That psychological traits could be significantly, or even primarily a function of genetics has not yet entered into the popular Zeitgeist, yet among academics this is entirely uncontroversial:
"As Rutter (2002) noted, ‘‘Any dispassionate reading of the evidence leads to the inescapable conclusion that genetic factors play a substantial role in the origins of individual differences with respect to all psychological traits, both normal and abnormal’’"
http://www.psy.miami.edu/faculty/dmessinger/c_c/rsrcs/rdgs/temperament/bouchard.04.curdir.pdf

There are specific examples of racial differences in genes related to important psychological aggression, in other words, the idea that the psychological profile of different racial groups might be functionally identical (if they had highly similar environments) is already entirely off the table:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886912004047

Is it safe to predict that those populations which score above average on pattern recognition, verbal comprehension, working memory, mathematical reasoning, all of which are used in measuring IQ, are also going to score well on achievement tests? The relationship between intelligence and academic achievement is well established, as should surprise no one.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289606000171

In lieu of further justification of the theory "different are people are different", what would this theory predict for the PISA scores of various nations, in light of their demographic makeup?

The average IQ of a nation will be a far better predictor of educational outcomes, exceptional curriculum and teachers cannot overcome a lack of ability.
East Asian countries are inhabited by the highest IQ demographic group in the world and will score the highest (no, Indians, Thai, and Malaysians are not East Asians).
White countries will trail behind East Asians in their scores, the degree to which these countries are also inhabited by large nonwhite populations with a low-average IQ is the degree to which any given White nation's educational achievement will lag behind more homogeneous White nations. The average IQ of American blacks is 85, they are 12% of the population, the average IQ of Mestizos is ~89 (Mestizo meaning 60% Mesoamerican 40% European mixed race group that makes up most of South/Central America) and they are approximately 16% of the American population, this will drag down the "US average" far below that of almost any homogeneous European country; even Eastern bloc countries with significantly less funding will often surpass the US due to their higher average IQ, owing to their demographic makeup. Countries which are more than 90% White and never suffered under Communism will be inclined to outscore both the US both in terms of IQ and educational achievement. Sweden's scoring below many ex-Soviet satellites states and the United States is potentially attributable to the significant numbers of asylum seekers they had accepted in from low-IQ countries over the previous decades, even a relatively small influx could significantly drag down their population of ~9.6 million (2013), it's impossible to confirm or deny this as the Swedish government refuses to report the relevant data about its demographics.
Arab and North African countries score significantly below White countries in average IQ, and will score significantly less than Whites and East Asians on PISA as a result.
Central/South American countries with an unusually large White European contingent will have a higher average IQ and tend to score better than their proportionally less White neighbors. In this sense, Chile has a slight demographic advantage and would be expected to outscore Brazil, and did, as it did Colombia. One potential exception to the theory is Argentina, which is claimed to be 97% White by the CIA World Factbook, note that the US itself was 90% White in 1960, and there is reason to think that Argentina is not as White as it once was: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/20059473/  As there is no official census data, it is impossible to determine if this data point fits in with the predictions or not.
If PISA scores for majority Sub-Saharan African countries were available, they would be by far the lowest.
Presently or previously Communist controlled countries will have an average IQ which is depressed by a few points. This caveat would predict a slightly depressed IQ and lower academic achievement for Vietnam, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Estonia, Latvia, and so on, which is entirely consistent with the data for PISA scores, though it does not explain why certain European countries might recover more quickly than others. The slight increase in IQ which has often occurred after the collapse of Communist regimes is in no way indicative of a universal malleability of intelligence in large populations, it is categorically different for one population to decline and recover to a previous point and for a different population to achieve an average level of cognitive functioning it is has never before come close to. In short, degeneration due to authoritarian mishandling of a centralized state is possible, but the improvement of a poor environment for a group that has never approached an average IQ of 100 will not undo their cognitive limitations.
https://i.imgur.com/oXEJTxQ.jpg
In short, the theory of "people are different" states that racial differences in IQ will better predict differences in PISA scores better than differences in spending.

Unlike a theory which assumes at least 95% of measured IQ differences between racial groups are a result of environmental differences, a theory which assumes heritable IQ differences between the races makes accurate and meaningful predictions of national outcomes, as shown above, deviations in scoring and spending which seemed absurd make perfect sense with national IQ data. The universality of East Asian academic achievement and intelligence cannot be explained by short-term environmental influences like culture, especially in the light of previously mentioned trans-racial adoption studies. The universality of Sub-Saharan African failure can not be dismissed by environmental influence, no environment, no matter how generous and humanitarian has ever succeeded in taking a low-IQ population of Sub-Saharan Africans and raising their average to that of 100, and even if high-IQ blacks are selectively let in, their children will regress towards the mean of their population (http://thealternativehypothesis.org/index.php/2017/01/16/regression-to-the-mean/). The failure of (mostly) White students in Luxembourg to achieve scores as high as the Japanese is best explained by innate neurological differences and not a bias or inadequacy of the test, if Occam's razor is to be upheld at all; if mere culture could raise a nation's average IQ to 105 and beyond, why hasn't that ever happened for any European population, or any non-East Asian population for that matter? And why has it consistently happened for East Asian populations, across time, across continents?

To summarize: if you would like for the students within the United States to score as well as Europeans on measures of academic success, ensure that White Americans have more children, or support eugenics programs to raise the average IQ of nonwhites. Raising taxes and additional spending will not accomplish what only genetics can accomplish, clever policy will not reform ghetto thugs into the New Soviet Man. Better schools are no substitute for smarter students, as the Japanese could tell Luxembourg and Switzerland.