Yes, and what you’re describing is inaccurate. This is a meme promulgated by the for-profit education industry but it’s based on people not comparing like cohorts. The American education system is huge and includes everyone, so if you compare averages it appears to produce worse results than systems which track poor/lower-performing kids out into vocational education, exclude kids with special needs or limited English proficiency, etc. but if you compare matching cohorts based on socio-economic status, etc. the results aren’t bad. The trick is realizing that research over the last century has shown that the most accurate predictor for educational outcomes is the socio-economic stability of their parents at birth, and the United States has both a lot of poor people and done less to help them than many of our peer countries.

Regarding science, there are plenty of American scientists who graduated from public high schools. The problem there is that even highly-qualified students probably aren’t going to have a research career because the funding isn’t there to support it - even if you look at people who completed graduate school that was like 1/10 even before the Republicans’ savage cuts.