A few observations from a concerned observer who stands ready to defer to your expertise, since you and not I are on the front line of educating young people.
I started in school in 1950 and graduated high school in 1962. This was in an upstate New York city of about 25,000 that enjoyed a reputation for having excellent schools, albeit nearly all the buildings were old. Technology consisted of 16mm projecters, slide projecters, phonographs and, rarely, a tape recorder. I don't think overhead projecters had been thought of yet.
Most of my teachers were products of the Great Depression and several, especially in the latter years, were male World War II veterans. Their approach to educating tended to be directive, very straightforward and very unforgiving of bad attitudes, including unwillingness to do assigned work. Getting an assignment wrong was problematic for teacher and student alike, but a pattern of failing to turn in assignments was unacceptable, with hell to pay a certainty, in school and at home.
Starting in seventh grade, junior high, homework was assigned nightly in most or all the core subjects - English, math, science and social studies - reading and written assignments alike. Every day I hauled two to four textbooks plus a three-ring binder between home and school. In high school the class and homework load increased dramatically, with term papers and other special projects thrown in, until the last half of my senior year.
When I was in junior high and high school, great emphasis was placed on essay writing and tests, as opposed to what were referred to disdainfully as "multiple guess" tests. We had reading all questions at least twice (to make sure we knew what was really being asked) and giving complete, clear and carefully thought out answers drummed into us. This was important during the year and absolutely vital for the end-of-year state Regents exams.
Nowadays, on the far side of the country in a much larger community whose schools enjoy a generally good reputation, I live a block from an elementary school and a half mile from a middle school. I also pass other schools in this part of town fairly often. When school lets out, few of the kids carry books or notebooks. This was the case when my son was in school, as well.
The stock answer to questions about homework is that most teachers either don't assign any or allow classroom time to complete what they assign. In high school, most of what homework is assigned is done in class or study hall.
I wonder if this approach is really best. I have my doubts.
I also note our city's schools are overseen by a sizeable bureaucracy. I have my doubts about how many assistant superintendents, area supervisors and curriculum specialists are really needed. I suspect we could do better with fewer of those and more teachers.
Well, I see now this excellent post is by Mike, and I don't know if Mike is a teacher. So if I've got egg on my face, forgive me.
Here's an additional thought or two.
I tend to think a really good teacher and a reasonable set of targets for accomplishment within a school year are most likely to achieve good results. Innovation can make a difference, too.
In public school I excelled at social studies and English, was a so-soer at arithmetic and an unmitigated disaster in algebra. I had bad dreams about it. I had an aching complex about it. I hated it with a vengeance, but I also hated to let it get the best of me.
I managed to fail it twice in high school, finally passing it, barely, in summer school.
Later, as a more-experienced and mature person with a dozen years of military service behind me, I took alegebra as a self-paced course in college. This course used 8-track tapes and excellent workbooks in a scheme designed by two professors who had figured out why so many students fail or do poorly in algebra. I got a B+ in Algebra I and an A in Algebra II using that method. I considered those professors gods. I also walked on air for weeks after getting that A.
Last but not least, I think teaching kids to read well should be jobs 1, 2 and 3. A kid who can read well can go on to educate him- or herself later on, if necessary. But a kid who can barely read is an educational and intellectual cripple whose future is likely to be forever diminished.
If I were in charge of education, every teacher would be a reading teacher, and kids who couldn't demonstrate an ability to read at least very close to the level of their peers would be packed off to an intensive all-day, every-day reading/coaching class until finally up to speed.
I don't care if the kid misses geography, arithmetic or anything else in the process. Reading is the single-most important learning skill a kid can acquire in school, with writing decently a close second. A school that fails in teaching all its kids of normal intelligence to read well has failed utterly, in my view.
I agree. Now I want a "how to" post!! 
Question:
I see big problems and shortcomings in public education, but when did we as a nation ever do a better job of educating the masses than we do now?
John Adams had a great education, but wasn't he in a tiny minority of his time?
In my grandparents' time a much smaller percentage of the population advanced beyond a few grades.
My father was the first in his family to receive a college degree, and he did it on the GI bill (Some folks who dinigrate government programs forget that they may owe their own prosperity, in part, to government programs of the past. And I received government loans for my own undergraduate work and my MA was completely paid by your tax dollars, in exchange for which I helped educate poor little Appalachian children.)
Many of my elementary classmates dropped out of school at 16.
I am certain that both of my daughters have received a better public education than I did.
As a teacher I've seen it all since 1969:
Incompetent school administration,
red-tape,
high-states-testing,
teaching-to-the-test,
wild pendulum swings:
from open classroom to NCLB;
from phonics to whole language and back again;
from John Holt allowing kids to learn whatever they wanted to John Saxon scripting every word of the teachers' lessons.
Through it all, I have always seen my primary job in education as an igniter of fires, even when I had to spend a lot of effort and time filling bureaucratic pails.
Great to have you posting again. Don't wait so long next time!
SW, you and I were writing simultaneously, I think. Excellent points.
You mention teaching all children, who are capable, to read. And to write. Those are certainly the primary goals of current school administrations with math next. (Except maybe for football.)
My problem is with putting all kids in the same basket. For the first half of my teaching carreer my major pet peeve was with those teachers who, I thought, expected too little of their students. The major goals of NCLB are laudable, but in practice there has to be some leeway to consider the individual child. To expect too little from a child is a damned waste and inexcusable; but to expect the impossible from a child is cruel and abusive.
BTW, I am pleased to know a little more about SW. I have been curious about your background. And I'm thrilled to find someone even older than me! I didn't graduate high school till '65! 
Wonderful post! And I agree, enthusiastically and emphatically by the way, with S.W. about reading being jobs 1, 2, and 3. Children need to be taught to read -- not just HOW to read but TO READ because reading is the basis for most learning. A child who reads much and enjoys it will become an avid learner as well.
Y'all know I meant "high-stakes-testing", not "testing-in-Colorado", I hope! Be kind: I turn 60 this month.
(Terry stop reminding everyone my third child is turning 60 this monrth.) I am struct dumb!
Great Post. Thanks Mike, Terrell, Joan and SW for teaching and for caring. A teacher passes along much more than knowledge.
Terry, I am trying to motivate myself to write that “how to” post and show what a “light a fire” school could look like -- give me oil in my lamp! -- I’ve already made a stab at such a project with my “The Educational Plan for a Proposed Community High School: Strategies for Excellence” which I pondered and worked on for over a year. I am trying to gird myself up to make another effort. If I can muster enough gumption, I will write a blog each week, for the next few weeks, on something that deals with some aspect of this next effort. This exchange provides a lot of starters.
Thanks, S.W., for your comments and particularly for sharing the story of your Algebra education. The fact that you succeeded at a self-paced rate says a lot about the value of personalizing education. But some students’ preferred pace to study Algebra would hover near zero -- and even a self-paced approach would not result in their Algebra success. My point is that the reason for your success was your motivation. To personalize education means to do more than make learning more accessible -- like the self-paced approach you spoke of -- because self-paced falls flat if the student fails to be engaged.
But Ruth hits the nail when she says that “a great teacher passes along much more than knowledge.” I am thinking about the concept of "teacher," and what the characteristics of a great teacher are. I am thinking about the qualities of a school and the qualities of a teacher within them, where, as Joan says, children are taught not just How, but are taught, “TO READ.” I am trying to understand a school design where great teachers would be developed.
I am this afternoon going to Pittsburgh to see my great-nephew compete in a regional robot contest in which his school is competing. I’m taking my movie camera and hope to edit a video. I’ve not tried to do anything as yet with my IMO VIE -- so this might be my first.
Thanks for the discussion.
Terrell, Mike, for the record, I'm all for innovation, including letting teachers do some special, even unconventional, thing if it works for them and produces a good result.
I also believe in doing as much as possible to meet individual student needs. I know that has to be especially challenging in a time when so many kids come from single-parent homes and, even in two-parent homes, so few kids have a parent at home during the day.
Teachers, just like their students, are very much individuals.
I had one junior high history teacher who had been a sergeant in the artillery in WW II. He had some stories that bordered on the raucous and even raw for those days. Being a native of Kentucky, he loved to talk basketball. That was funny because he was way too short to play basketball.
There was rarely a dull moment in Mr. Russ' class. If he noticed anyone gazing out the window too long, drawing doodles or nodding off, he'd get in their face and do his drill sergeant routine, which was all the louder for his artillery experience. Once, he yelled at someone so loudly a picture fell off the wall, its glass front shattering on the floor.
My other junior high history teacher was a middle-aged spinster who had started to become a nun but gave that up to care for her ailing parents. She later became a teacher. She was soft of voice and mostly gentle of nature, but she had steel-hard dedication and high standards for conduct, hers and everyone else's. She had a definite sense of humor, but of a very genteel sort. She enjoyed baseball, was a Yankees fan, and insisted the game required brains as well as brawn, unlike football. And, of course, she was a highly effective teacher whose love for and knowledge about her subject was infectious.
Rote learning is way out of vogue now, but one of the absolute requirements for passing her eigth-grade American History class was being able to recite, and write a large portion of The Gettysburg Address from memory. It seemed an onerous chore then. Yet I take delight in being able to recite the very beginning to this day, and I've gone back and re-read it several times, savoring the richness of language, the internmingling of historical and religious references with then-current events, the bigness of spirit and exemplary humility in victory Lincoln brought toegether so eloquently.
Would I have gone back to re-read The Gettysburg Address and gained so much more from it as an adult who helped care for the badly injured from another war in a different war-torn land, had Miss Moran not insisted I memorize a good part of it years ago? I don't think so.
Two very different people, two very different styles of teaching. Yet both were, IMO, truly excellent.
My reaction: a good thoughtful post, great comments and, wow, a flood of memories!
In my first two years of college, one of my part-time jobs was as a playground supervisor. The principal hired me and sent me over to the district office to fill out paperwork and I was astounded: it was an old elementary school filled with staffers in every room; talk about bureaucracy!
Years later, a writer friend of mine invited me to read at a private elementary school run by two master teachers, a husband and wife team. They were it; they had one part-time assistant to take care of administrative chores and I suppose they might have had an accountant somewhere in town but that was all. I watched them teach and I watched the kids and I was a little sorry I couldn't start over again. They had the kids very motivated.
Motivation. Engagement. Focus. Those are some of the qualities I remember from my best teachers. They had those qualities and they gave them. The enthusiastic ones were motivated, engaged and focused by definition (hmm, sounds like Terrell talking about when he reads those poems and stories). The master teachers who ran a disciplined class were also focused by definition.
My best teacher was Mrs. Weaver in the first grade, a master teacher if there ever was one; she was in her early sixties at the time. I entered first grade with a signficant hearing loss and Mrs. Weaver asked that I be put in her class (though I didn't learn that for some years). She had me off to a very fast start. I always liked her but it took me many years before I realized what a master teacher she was. She was disciplined and organized but I realize in retrospect that her particular talent was that she could read kids very well and adjusted quickly, smoothly and accordingly. Yeah, she kept us all motivated.
But my favorite teacher for a long time was Mr. Holliday, my sixth grade teacher. He took us everywhere on Friday evenings and Saturdays—sometimes with the help of parents, sometimes with as many kids as possible who could fit in his over-sized station wagon (he often had a sign-up list and those who had their week's work done first as well as their permission slips could sign up); we saw plays, a bread factory, an alligator farm, military shows, a marina with Chinese junks, the typesetters at the Los Angeles Times, and on and on. When the world gets big for young people, it's easy to get motivated.
Wow. It's the school's job to motivate students? I suppose that's so if students are all hatched in test tubes and, having no parents, are wards of the state. Failing that, it is, to put it simply, the job of parents to motivate their offspring, by any legal means at their disposal, for you see, children don't always comprehend what is best for them and tend to give little thought to the future. It is a student's job to take full, daily advantage of the educational opportunities provided for them by their teachers.
It should go without saying that teachers must provide that opportunity. Of course teachers should be encouraging and should work to present interesting and engaging lessons, but ultimately, learning is not all about entertainment and the classroom is not a movie about a motivational football coach who takes a group of losers to the state championship on the force of his personality. Learning takes work. If a student is unwilling to do that work, no amount of teacher motivation will prevail.
hey yoiu gys are a bit long and bopring.. very dangerous if you driving while reading this...
but if you are in french class then it change anything.. you will sleep anyway!
well thats wanted to say on this suject thanks a lot to have read this..
dangerous dan !
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