This is indeed a serious problem. An interesting startup that is trying to address it is http://www.mathalicious.com/. They give math teachers lesson plans which tie math to things that students care about - 'is Kobe Bryant a better shooter than LeBron James?'. Things like that.

From my own experience, I was pretty bored with Math in high school. Through a series of coincidences I started reading some popular physics books, which led me to study Physics and re-discover Math as an incredible tool.