I agree with you, OP, but this is not going to change because of what blossom pointed out about funding and other issues that vary by locale.
However, I do think that academic programs that are national in scope should be standardized. For example, AP classes. I wrote in another thread that our AP sciences meet 7.5 hours per week, yet at other schools an AP class with the exact same title and which is supposed to cover the same curriculum might meet anywhere from 3.75 hours per week up to 8 hours per week. Obviously, the 8 hour per week course can perform more labs than the course that meets half the number of hours, can cover more material in greater depth, and will likely require more lab reports and other work. Do college admissions officers differentiate? I doubt it.
Secondly,National Honor Society and national subject area honor societies should be standardized. Why should kid A in town B get to have a lower GPA and do fewer community service hours than Kid Y in town Z to gain admission to the exact same national organization? At least for National Merit recognition, where the cutoff is much lower in West Virginia than in NJ, the standards are published. I am well aware that NHS is not that important for top students, but the fact remains that a supposedly national designation means something different for one kid than it does for another.
Third, I think the school profile or the student’s application should indicate what participation in say marching band, or varsity athletics, or ABC club entails at their school as far as hours and obligations. For example, our public high school track team may travel on weeknights to 5 hour long meets in a different state, which means the students miss half of their last class and don’t get home until 10:30 PM. At a different school, the team never does that, but instead just takes a 10 min. bus ride to the next town for a 2 hour meet. Big difference. Being on varsity on our team may entail competing in 10 such meets, whereas at another school they run in only 5. It’s fine that there’s local and school variation, but there should be a way for college adcoms to know what “varsity” means at each school.