My eldest went to a local French school for many years (the teachers were all employed by the French school system and the followed the national curriculum). Their system is quite simply much better than ours.
Val, judging the French school system by that school would be like judging the American school system by the American School of Paris. Pretty meaningless in both cases.
France has a single national curriculum. All French schools follow it. If you order distance learning courses from France, you get them from the government and they follow the same curriculum as the schools.
Teacher quality may vary (though not nearly as much as it does here), but the basic idea is the same in every school in France. My son learned pretty much the same poems and the same math algorithms as kids in Montpelier and Paris and Lille. When French students finish what we call college-bound high school, they all take the same exit exam.
So while one can talk about differences between individual schools and teachers in France, the system is the same everywhere, and I
can compare it.
ETA: Comparability is actually an important part of the French system. With a single national curriculum, people can move and know that CM2 or whatever grade will be the same in the new school as it was in the old school.
Whereas if there are six private schools and one public district in a single American city or town, they will probably all follow different curricula. Public schools in neighboring towns may have different curricula because of having different school boards.
