OT: American High School Education ?

Q: i'm a student from Germany and I was asked to write an essay about American High School Education and to compare it with Secondary Education in Britain. I was also supposed to include personal opinion. So, I would be really grateful if anyone could give me some short answeres to these questions: Do you think the system of local control and financing is good? What does the High School you attend or attended look like (How many pupils, what about academic programs, consevative or liberal teaching staff, sport and social activities, anything)? Was the personal and the guidance counseling helpful? Do "dropouts" have a fair chance to get a job after finishing HS? What do you think about the way the colleges choose their students (SATs, granting scholarship etc.)?

A:In the UK, there is a system of local control and financing. In the US, it's more district control - which is not exactly local. Financing comes from the state into local districts, but a district could be so large (as in Los Angeles and Miami-Dade) that it effectively is no longer local. I think local financing is hard to deal with - what if there isn't a tax base to finance the schools, for instance. But local control usually results in more families being involved with their kids' educations. The problem with local control, however, is that unless you have a national curriculum, as in the UK, what one district or school does may have no relation to the next one, so pupils moving from place to place may not get a complete education. Each high school has its own personality. Mine was an area school - one high school for the region, due to the lower population. We had an olympic sized swimming

pool, a planetarium, a fully outfitted physics lab, along with the regular classrooms. Staff varied, as it does in all schools. Clubs were about the same as everywhere... My children were all home schooled. (My own high school education was complete thirty-five years ago. I doubt you'd find data that old very useful.) Each class was tailored to the child's individual needs and each subject, including its sequence in the curriculum, designed to heighten his skills and abilities. There were no "social activities", as one miught expect in a government-run high school, but there were abundant activites my children attended in our community.