> So what point am I making: I've read that schools are teaching creationism...
The difference between the America as portrayed in sensationalized news headlines and the America I live in is vast.
No, creationism isn't standard curriculum in high schools and no, students aren't spending 80% of their time on sports. When you see these things in news stories, their newsworthiness stems from the fact that it's abnormal, not because it's the norm.
America has half the population of all of Europe and a similar amount of landmass. It's a big enough country that if you go looking, you're going to find pockets of weird culture. The mistake is to assume that when journalists highlight the worst of these, that it's actually representative of the norm.
Judging the US by these stories would be similar to me judging your European education by some of the wild anecdotes my Romanian coworker relayed about his high school experience there.
I suspect his experience has nothing to do with yours, naturally. However, when people read horror stories about bad US schools, they assume it applies to every single high school in the entire country for some reason.