I've experienced both the American public school system and a charter school system. Both systems prioritized raw memorization over actual learning. Even though my grades were mostly pretty good, many math and science concepts I learned back then have long since been forgotten. I was rarely made to actually engage with anything I was learning outside of the occasional assignment.
The fact key information you need as an adult like doing taxes, buying a house or apartment, and writing a resume aren't taught outside of optional home ec. classes is also odd. English, social studies, science, and math are required, so I'm not sure why such an important class isn't required.
The way my autism was handled by the various public schools I went to was also not the best. In elementary school I had occasional appointments with the school's speech therapist that didn't help much. We just addressed my anxieties rather than my actual struggles with speech. In the sixth grade I was having issues with getting to class to class and organizing. My parents tried reaching out to the principal and requested an aide and she said to my face "you're not autistic enough to need one." I ended up switching to online school for a year before transferring to a different middle school simply because I couldn't handle it at the time. In the seventh grade I was put in a speech class for kids on the spectrum and I had a few appointments with another speech counselor. The information was not what I needed. I already knew basic facial expressions, slang, basic body language, and sarcasm. The help I needed was in reading more nuanced facial expressions, starting and holding a conversation, reading advanced body language, and maintaining my volume and tone. After just one term the staff realized I didn't need the basics and just quit trying to help me. I ended up having to learn all of those things on my own, and even then there are huge gaps in my knowledge. To this day I can't hold eye contact for long or tell the difference between a tired or an irritated face. I just forget body language even exists unless someone comments on my own. For the students who needed those basics I'm glad those resources were available, but I definitely needed an alternative. I imagine there are many cases like my own where the school simply didn't have the right resources to accommodate us. I hope in the future that may change.
My charter school experience was quite a bit different. The school very much presented itself as a "college prep" high school. We were allowed to customize our schedules like college students as long as we still had those four required subjects I mentioned earlier. It was refreshing and I enjoyed the extra breaks I got in between classes. At the same time, I learned even less there than I did in the public schools. The place was obsessed with test scores. Every class was designed purely to make us score higher on the ACT, which was a test 11th graders took to show colleges how we perform. The workload was almost nonexistent. The longest essay I ever wrote in that school was two pages and I was allowed to graduate despite only taking a few math classes. There were no textbooks whatsoever, which meant I didn't have to study once and still got reasonable grades. For many people this sounds wonderful, and at the time it was. I had so much free time during high school. The thing is it didn't prepare me for college at all. Once I graduated high school I had no idea how to write an essay beyond 500 words and my math skills were way behind. To this day I cannot do math any more advanced than basic algebra. It wasn't out of laziness, I just never needed to study or read a textbook. The school promised to prepare me for college and all I got was the ability to make a decent class schedule. I've had to drop all my classes multiple times in college just because I wasn't used to the workload.
Despite my issues with both public and charter schools, I still appreciate the efforts that are made by educators. Teachers in this country are severely underpaid for the amount of work they put in and most of them still do their best. Nearly every teacher I've had has been amazing despite the long hours, problematic students, and never ending workload. You can tell they're doing this because they want to teach, not because of the money. I think with some restructuring on how schools approach learning and accommodating disabilities, the system could be much better.
