The US, it varies by state and even then by city, and even within that city, there are some wild imbalances. I go to a school that actually does require quite a bit of work every night, even as a second term high school senior where a lot of my classes are electives. I won't say all classes are a lot of work, teachers have free reign to assign as much or as little as they want, but there are trends. Since the English grades are determined mostly by essay, students put a lot of work into them, raising the standard for essay writing in English classes, but some classes have pretty easy essay standards. The science classes in general love weekly assignments over daily ones, the math classes love daily assignments, the history teachers are slackoffs as long as their classes have interesting students who already know history, and the foreign language classes are jerks all around (though when it comes time for the state exam, even the terrible students like me ace it). The courses are all honors (which are about a year or two ahead of everyone else), some are AP, my school even mandates AP World History and 85% of the students take more than one AP at a time. Mine isn't the only school, there's others across the US, but they're few and generally far between.
Most schools are not like mine. They house the majority of the population and are actually the standard. Less work, less education, easier standards, but you'll see people genuinely failing the state exams. Some schools are trashier than others. A lot of zone schools are funded by the taxes paid directly by the district they service in America, which leads to the uncomfortable situation where areas filled with rich people have better public schools than poorer zones, even though they don't need those better facilities because they have the money to send their kids to private school. This leads to people falsifying their residences to get their kids better educations, which is the unfortunate circumstance all across America. Some schools are semi-public (like they get extra money set aside by the state and aren't zone bound, persay), but go through a lottery. Parents cry when their children don't get in because luck wasn't on their side. Others rejoice when their number is called.
NYC does it differently, though. I actually have no clue if any other place in America does it, but NYC gives a city-wide exam to 8th graders and the highest scorers get to go to specialized schools like mine where they can slave away laboriously and learn a ton of crap, while the others are zone schooled. The specialized schools simply get more funding. A lot of it. Since the majority in those schools are Asian (I believe mine is around 70% Asian) and they're filled with all the geek kids, there is basically no violent crime, which means the city only has to send a few security guards there, and their job is mostly taking in visitors and kicking students off floors they're not supposed to be on. Crime is limited to petty thefts and non-violent drug use by about 4% of the student population, with a few exceptions (we had arsons last year, but the kid got expelled). On the other end of the spectrum, you got the zone schools, and some of them are alright, some of them are underfunded. You got the majority in there, some of the kids who fucked up the exam that are intelligent anyway, some of the kids who didn't learn much before high school, etc. Maybe a bit of crime, but most of it is controlled and non-violent.
I can't speak for the rest of America, though. I know my area is the exception, not the rule.
