There is no doubt in my mind that the US school system is terrible. My wife and I moved here (US) from Canada a few years ago. My wife was a Teaching Assistant at UCI for a year and some of the papers she had to grade were appalling. I would say that overall, the students were at a grade 10 level at best (grade 10 in other parts of the world) and these were university students! Near as I can tell (having never attended school myself in the US), there are two big problems with the school system down here:

1. No discipline, no failures - teachers have no teeth or method of punishment anymore. Students do and say what they want and no one seems to fail anything regardless of how poor they do.

2. No focus on the classroom. I don't know where all the education money goes, but it certainly isn't into the classroom.

An interesting quote I heard recently regarding taxes, "What kind of message does it send when a company can write-off 100% of a $100,000 Hummer, but as a parent, you can only claim $3000 as an education expense for a child in post-secondary school?"

The saddest thing is that to effects of the poor school system are like cancer; you don't find out until many years later...

GB