The variation in educational standards and practices between districts in America is too large to make generalizing from one's own experience very useful except insofar as it demonstrates that the critiques given in the article cannot be universal.

When I talk to friends who went to decent schools (which is pretty much all of my friends,) their experiences, cynical though they might be about them, don't reflect the sort of scandal the OP describes. When I talk to acquaintances who work as teachers for seriously disadvantaged schools through programs like Teach For America, the general consensus appears to be "No matter how bad you think it is, it's always worse."