I also am not a huge fan of the amount of "busy work." This is just the work that professors are required to give you to fulfill some degree requirement. Almost nothing I've learned in college has been applicable to any of my business-related work, although I don't think we can hold an undergraduate degree up to much glory.
The question is whether that is a problem. I for one don't really think that traditional secondary ed is the right place for teaching tech. Tech moves too fast.
We need to fix the school systems to more effectively cover their domain: sciences and humanities. Technology, however, is best learned as we learn it: free-form, self-directed, online. There is no need to merge that into curricula.
(Note, there's a difference between technology and CS: CS is algorithmics, theory; it's a branch of math, really. Technology is applied: websites, programming languages, things of this sort. Any curricular approach to technology is doomed to constantly lag the tech education available extracurricularly.)
There's real busywork: work assigned just to take your time, create something to grade. That's crap, it should go away. (And in my collegiate experience, largely has.)
Then there's "impractical stuff": people often malign work they do that doesn't directly apply to the real world, but I think that it is often worthwhile. Consider MIT's famed 6.001: few of its students ever use Scheme, or any functional language, professionally, but the work in Scheme is never the less worthwhile. (Disclosure, I love functional languages.)
Unless they make all their content private and don't participate in the community, which is an option too.
I can certainly agree with you about that. IB has been around for 30 years, and just got any foothold in American 10 years ago. I was lucky enough to go to one of the early public IB schools.