My experience
I taught English Literature at a private school in S.D. for a year and a half. They claimed to be a bilingual school - or were getting ready to get ready to get ready to become a bilingual school. I think "bi-focused" might be more appropriate.
Lesley D's first post sums it all up very well. The American schools are - by all acounts - very formidable with schools in the states (hence the name i guess). Public schools are borderline criminal*, and the private schools are in it for the money mostly, but can - and do - offer a decent alternative.
As for the government's requirements, well, umm.....do the math. They ain't too sharp. Education to them is seemingly just another pothole in the barrio - let someone else worry about it. I could offer a few UNBELIEVABLE stories for you on their "requirements".
I taught 6-12th grades. We used Harcourt's literature books. In general, we used about 1-2 grades below the students actual grade level - so 11th graders were using 9th grade level reading and so on.
Personally (and many students agreed) I thought that was shooting a bit too low, and may even be considered a waste of time for some. However, when you have a classroom full of kids with a great divide in levels, an arguement exists to promote this approach. Regardless, if you were inspired, you could make it work. I had better stories than most of the textbooks, so we often used "Gringoinshorts" books intead of "Harcourts".
Considering there was no mission statement, no definitive guidelines or formal curriculum development in this school ? and I had little-to-no teaching experience, the Harcourt books were ideal. They included lesson planning help, basic comprehension tests, and the stories were of an appropriate length to inhibit even the most ardent of daydreamers - me included!
I pushed really hard to get the seniors (this was the first senior class at the school) to tackle novels instead of the stodgy and elemental textbooks. I chose Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Cyrano de Bergerac and a few other classics. We also found a book called "Voices from Vietnam" to be really interesting and timely - as in we f'd up there just as we are in Iraq.
The teaching approach I took with the novels was to avoid getting too caught up in themes, symbolism and motifs, but focus more on what the reading meant to them.
Instead of having them stammer for words in english to depict the elemental parts of the novel, I just let them offer their opinions on what the book(s) meant to them, totally personal.
They would be graded not on being right and wrong to what the book meant, but what they took from it and how they identified the important (to them) parts and how they formed their opinions and especially how they defended them. We would break sections of the book(s) apart and come up with some raucous debates (not arguing - that was a rule) on characters development, it's significance in the storyline and how we might (personally) approach some situations differently - as we are, here and now.
The end result was some students reaching far beyond anything I could have imagined or hoped for, some amazing improvements in writing. Also - the real beauty of this - was how crazy some thought processes were of these students. That alone raised the interest level to epic proportions and really got some, heavily involved. Yes, we'd get off topic, but to get some of the lower level students involved it took a little wandering.
What I impressed upon their parents was that they may not know bunk about the motifs of Tom Sawyer or Cyrano, but they are building skills to use english in a way that will help them in the future - to build positions, defend them and do so in a measurable and meaningful manner. It sounded good at the time....
One thing I learned for sure is that the learning of languages is far easier in the very young, before they've formed a social picture of themselves; uninhibited, oblivious to embarassment, failure and the rest.
Also, being a native speaker (and with no espanol to begin with) I had an advantage (for work anyway) in that I couldn't revert to their native tounge. I noticed time and time again the natives going back to spanish to get a point across; disciplinary or whatever. That opening always invited more and more spanish and that's a tough tide to fight.
There is no comparison to teaching adults and teaching students. The adults are paying out of their own pocket and are hungry. School-age students are NOT hungry and NOT paying. School is just another obstacle to the weekend and the beach.
Another advantage is that I had a lot of life experiences to draw from and could make my stories entertaining AND with a theme. That keeps interest and conversation high, and if we found a subject to talk about, that everyone could tune into, the books wouldn't get opened and we'd just dive right into whatever was of interest. From there came opportunities to examine and use (practice) the language on various fronts.
Probably not what Harvard is looking for, but when they only get 52 minutes of english a day, it better be a good 52.
(*) "criminal" is probably inappropriate. I don't KNOW anything about public schools really, just what we all hear and read - and what many of my students and their parents offered for reference.