When we moved down here, my son Christopher started instrumental music in the schools on bassoon. (Go figure.) He made excellent progress over the years, in large part due to having a professional bassoonist living next door to give him lessons in playing and reedmaking.
Then came high school. First off, he was told that he was going to play some sort of brass instrument for the first third of the year, since marching band was the be all and end all of their music program. Next, he was told that he had to spend four weeks during his summer vacation going to "fish camp" to learn how to fit into their marching band program. The alternative was that he would not be playing in the top level band.
So much for instrumental music. As the summer camp requirement would have kept him from hockey camp up in Quebec City during the summer (he played semi-pro hockey (juniors level) for a year in his senior year, spent up in Saint Louis), he took the Mozart route and played outside of the school structure. I had him up on sax by his junior year, and he did three musicals during that time as well. And, he played bassoon in the orchestra up north (we didn't have an orchestra down here) during his senior year.
He still is a comparative wizard on the faggotte, and can play rings around me with little practice over the past six years or so. My lovely wife attributes his character at this point to the fact that he learned how to read tenor clef, while I (a reprobate by any standard that you might choose to use to compare us) still have not mastered that skill. However, he is hopeless on soprano clarinet and can only barely get by on the bass, so I own him in that regard.
Most (but not all) of the public school music folks that I have had to deal with down here have been so focused on the marching band and contest competitions that they tended to leave the musicality part of the equation largely unaddressed. The private school folks, not having to worry about huge marching band issues, are a bit more normal.