The thing about the U.S. is that it encourages competition particularly in lower levels - not within the school system entirely, but also partially despite it.
The way public school systems are set up, you get multiple social spheres that are forced to interact. You've got the sports group - the people who push away their boredom for school with a fascination for physical activity. There're the honor students, or whatever you want to call them - the people who study for hours a day, who partake in activities with Machiavellian efficiency. The ones who will do anything as long as it means a shot at the Ivies.
Those are the two ones people know and talk about. The one that ISN'T mentioned, the one that absolutely exists, is the smaller sphere of people who know what they want to do with their life. It's always a set of bright students, but students that have no seeming motivation toward school. They're just as real a group as the other two, but they have no need to announce their presence, so they're really often missed when people talk about them. They're the people, I think, that really propel innovation.
The interesting thing is that beyond a sort of personal drive, those people tend to have nothing outwardly in common. There're very nerdy people in that group and there are people as far from nerds as they come. Quiet people, loud people. They blend between the other spheres - despite a focus on things not school-related, a ton of them go to really top-notch schools. I'd put myself in this category. I very rarely put an effort into any part of school, did no work, and I'm still going to a really top-notch public school. It's not an Ivy, it's not what I've been told for a long time I ought to be striving for, but I've known for a long time what I want to do with life and I don't think that an Ivy League school can help me any more than a really good school can. Me and people like me become part of the statistic that drag schools down a lot. The sports sphere helps a lot, because the sports sphere is the sort that really shouldn't be kept in schools, because the sports sphere just doesn't care. But among the top-tiered students, it's the ones that don't care about standardized testing or academics at all that keep American schools so low.
That's also a huge boon for America, though. I can't talk about other generations, but in this generation it's entirely likely that by the time we're all going to college a lot of us have tried our hands at several things and dabbled in them. A lot of us have some semblance of "real world" experience, in other words. I tried my hand at a web start-up in my sophomore year. In my senior year I published a book. Neither thing is world-changing, but it means that as I work on web development today, when I try writing again, I've got a lot of experience as to what learns and what doesn't. A friend of mine has been learning how to code and create models for game design since something like eighth grade. A bunch of my friends have launched sites and blogs of their own; one friend was mentioned on G4 for a tutorial he wrote. This isn't a particularly exceptional school I'm at, either; nearly every school I know the name of has its share of breakthrough kids.
I can only speak for my culture, not for others. But it seems to me that paradoxically, it's America's inability to handle kids like that that makes its school system so effective in delivering innovation. When you have a culture of youth that's already experienced and capable of learning from its mistakes, you have a core generation that has an edge over even the best-taught students from the rest of the world. You get a sort of encouragement of big ideas and of youth. You grow up hearing stories about Bill Gates at 19 and Steve Jobs at 21; about the Beatles and the Beach Boys and about all the musicians who started in grade school. (Incidentally, I think that the fact that there are no real writers who made it that young corresponds to the fact that so few young people want to be writers.) We get stories about Welles making Citizen Kane at an age when most graduates are just looking for jobs. It teaches this idea that it doesn't matter what your grades are, because you could be getting things done rather than studying, and that introduces a whole new aspect on to your world.