I think my school did pretty well with sex-ed. In 5th grade, we learned about the body and had one unit on sex and reproduction. After the lessons, all the boys went to the male teacher for discussion, and all the girls went to the female teacher. Dunno what the boys did, but us girls talked about a lot and asked a lot of personal questions not covered in the lecture. It's also common knowledge in the school system I was in that the parents talk to their kids extensively at this point. We didn't have to bring books home or anything; my mom asked me if I understood everything and told me to come to her with any questions and that was that.
Then in 8th grade we had a class that focused more on sex, STDs, teenage pregnancy, all that stuff. We had special speakers come in a talk and answer questions. If we had a question we thought was too embarasing, we'd hand them in at the beginning without our names.
I went to a Christian school so of course the stress is on abstainence, but we covered all the STDs and various methods of prevention.
Personally, I'm not sure how I'd feel about sex ed classes that had kids practice putting condoms on bananas and stuff like that. I mean, if you need a class lesson to figure out how to use a condom, you should probably be a) discussing that with your parents or b) not having sex if you're not prepared.
Sometimes I'm embarrassed to be a teen ager because of the poor choices and lack of accountability and responsibility some of us have (I'm not saying we shouldn't have sex, but we shouldn't do it b/c of pressure, and if we've got STDs go to the clinic and deal with it before sleeping with three other people, etc). Poor choices of teenagers and lack of parental involvement I feel are just as big of issues as sex ed in school.