<p>I can speak to the required summer reading for our school district. Starting in Middle School (6th grade) each child is required to read two books over the summer from a list and a third book is free choice. For the kids in the more advanced reading classes they have harder books to choose from.</p>
<p>In High School only the honors and AP students have required summer reading, which I think is setting the mark pretty low for the other students. After having to read books for three years in MS, they were already in the habit anyway. Here's the link for required reading at our schools:<a href="http://www.slsd.org/high_school/resources/index.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.slsd.org/high_school/resources/index.html</a> As you can see it starts off pretty easy with four books for 9th grade, then 5 books for 10th grade but 11th grade is crazy with 8 books. If you take AP euro in 11th grade, you'll have two more books to read plus essay's to write.</p>
<p>I think our school is pretty good. All of the kids I know feel that they were prepared for college academically.</p>