I don't think that one is really read in schools. We did read an Ayn Rand book in my high school (in Texas), but it was Anthem, a much shorter novella, with a more general theme of future-utopia-is-actuallly-dystopia, ending with a paean to individualism. It bears some similarities to a more recent book, The Giver, which is also popular as young-adult literature.
I haven't read her other books, but from a literary perspective, Anthem has the same problem that I gather her other works have, just in miniature: there is a core of an actual novel there and it's starting to build an interesting world and characters, but then at some point it degenerates into a pages-and-pages-long non-fiction essay in Ayn Rand's voice pasted into the book, with a pretty flimsy excuse for what these pages of text are doing in a novel (I think in Anthem it's the character thinking out loud or something).
I haven't read her other books, but from a literary perspective, Anthem has the same problem that I gather her other works have, just in miniature: there is a core of an actual novel there and it's starting to build an interesting world and characters, but then at some point it degenerates into a pages-and-pages-long non-fiction essay in Ayn Rand's voice pasted into the book, with a pretty flimsy excuse for what these pages of text are doing in a novel (I think in Anthem it's the character thinking out loud or something).