My old high school has this really annoying habit of constantly renovating the building but never ever raising teachers' salaries. As you imagine the computers are state-of-the-art but the education kinda suffers...

About math, it is necessary if you go into science after high school, but a lot of kids graduate without mastering basic math and then fail horribly at calculus (here HS runs until grade 11 and then we have two years of university prep called CEGEP). Like me, for instance.