Is the quality of our current education system really this low?

As the school year comes to an end, we all have to take our finals . I attend a high school in California, and today was my History and Math finals. I'm pretty bad at Math so I was breezing through the final but one particular question caught my attention:
I dont remember the exact question but it was very similar to this:
It gave a long math problem blah blah and it said I kid you not Pick that correct formula. Even though it's Math, shouldn't the grammar be correct?

So I blew that off and went on to my next class, US History. We got two finals, one was the teachers exam and the other was the California exam. The teachers one I blew right through, but when it came to the state test there I encountered some problems. My teacher always complains about teaching to this test and not what he wants to teach so right away he gave us 9 free answers to questions that we did not learn. Then I came across this one question that really had me flustered for the rest of the day.
When the United States launched Sputnik 1
A) increased space race
B)blah
C)
D)
I forget the answer choices, but the point is that on the state exam they just said the the United States launched the Sputnik 1. Now if they had wrote the US I might see a very slim possibility that this can be mixed up with USSR but they clearly wrote UNITED STATES. To me this is inexcusable, so when I came home I googled wrong state tests and I see that this is not a rare occurrence. I just wanted to share my experience even though it may be a little long winded (sorry) and gather some of your opinions. And I would just like to add the disclaimer that this may not all be perfectly written, so please dont bash me for bashing grammar as I'm not the state of California.

I just don't think education is a high enough priority here in the U.S. We can't really blame the students, I think we just hire shoddy teachers to be honest. Our standards aren't high enough.
One thing about the good old U.S. of A: we're very good at fixing things AFTER they become problems... In our defense though, I dount that we are the only nation with this issue.
I think it will get better as soon as we get our priorities sorted out. Hopefully.

I don't remember every encountering blunders like that on any of my California issued tests. I believe that students can tell the difference between good and bad teachers however. Usually in 'good' teachers' classes I succeed more because I feel like they actually care about me succeeding. Ther are always those 'bad' teacher who just plain give easy work though.