Schools are run by very bloated bureacracies. Each large school district has a department of bureaucrats for each discipline--math, science, votech, etc. They have a ton of paperwork to feed the Feds. Teachers are loaded with administrative garbage to fill out. They spend as much time with administrative tasks as they spend teaching.
I know an excellent teacher who could not wait to retire because the paperwork she had to feed the administrators drove her up the wall.
And are we producing students of the same caliber as schools in Germany, Japan, China? Maybe at a 1 for 10 ratio.