Plenty of places in the U.S. have terrible public schools by developed-country standards. To the point where U.S. tertiary-education institutions are essentially required to compensate for the terribleness with ubiquitous remedial and GED-like courses that are essentially unknown elsewhere, where secondary education does the job properly.
it’s a big country, i don’t know how it compares with all of Europe as far as schools. Schools in Chicago area, for example, are great and there is a big choice of public and private.