I was graduated from high school in Slovakia 2 years ago. In my town (about 45,000 inhabitants, 12th largest in Slovakia) there are 11 high schools (with 50-1000 students).
I was actually attending 8-year grammar school - a special school that merges elementary and high school, allowing me to finish my studies 1 year sooner than standard education. This was intended to be for "smarter" kids. (It isn't.) However in terms of quality I think it is similar to most of the high schools.
Out of about 11 classes I've taken every year, only 7 actually required some effort to get an A.
Some teachers did not even care about "cheating" on the exams - it was pretty common for me to solve all variants in 20 minutes and then distribute it in the class.
At the beginning of the school year, we got about 20 textbooks chosen by Ministry of Education. Half of them were never used, some were 15 years old. We paid only for few textbooks.
Students were bored, teachers were bored. Only few took their job seriously, only one was doing more than required.
During the classes like Biology, Geography, Chemistry, History and Slovak literature, the teacher dictated what we should write. During the next class, one was chosen and graded based on how good he/she memorized the notes.
The more students the school have, the more money it gets. Every school keeps as many students as possible. Even if they do not pass the entry test.
The last year was by far the most wasted year of my life. Student chooses 4 subjects from about 9 possible for the state exams. We were however still obliged to take 12 subjects. All teachers stopped teaching the other subjects, because it "was not required for our state exams" and "gave us time to learn the important subjects". They were simply lazy. Sometimes they didn't even attend the class.
Today I remember almost nothing except Maths and English.
On the other hand, free WiFi. And a lot of time for personal projects.
They are not. I am not from Slovakia, but Albania (a neighbor country) and I can say that the average public high-school in the US is not any better than most high-schools in south-eastern Europe.
But, graduating from an US high school gives you much higher chances to get accepted to a US college, and get a scholarship (if you have top grades).
Talking this from experience: I came in the US for my senior year of high school as an exchange student (lived with an american family), and then got a full academic scholarship from an american university.
I was taking mostly AP classes, but still found my self running circles around most students in sciences (math, physics, chemistry) etc, and I found generally much easier experience than my classes back in Albania (even with the language handicap I had at the time). But still, that year in the US was very valuable in learning language, culture, making life-long friends, and getting me into college with a full scholarship.
Since when is Albania a neighbor of Slovakia? Nearby maybe but it's not an neighbor. This being a bit of off-topic, now the main part:
There are a lot of high schools in those countries. So you just CAN'T say the high-schools "are better", "are worse" or something like that. Which high-school do you mean exactly? Which course? The questions go on ...
So going deeper in that struct -- being one of the brightest in your Albanian high-school, could make you one of the good ones in some of the USA high-schools ... but sorry that is just not enough to say, that the Albanian educational system is better compared to that of the USA.
We had some problems in that part of Europe and sadly the education suffered a lot ...
