I've wondered about it often. I have no idea what to do. None.I sympathize. It seems to me that part of the block comes from defining the problem monolithically: how can we take the standard system we have and make a better standard system out of it? Nobody seems to have a good answer to that. Maybe we should stop asking it and instead go through a period of decentralization and even destandardization. Let all sorts of experiments be tried. There's a study I read about that showed that when great schools or great teachers achieve amazing things, attempts to reproduce what they do almost always fail. The problem seems to be in the systematizing impulse itself. Can there even be a bureaucracy that sustains life, joy, creativity?
Here's an example of what I mean (I may have even got this from Gatto). In the traditional one-room farm schoolhouse, there weren't enough children to segregate by age, so by necessity they would work side by side on different things. This has interesting effects. You no longer have the problem that not all kids are at the same level; each is working at his/her level anyway. So, no reason why a bright 9-year-old can't study math with the 15-year-olds (but play with kids their own age at recess). Another example is that because one teacher simply can't address all the different subjects at once, older kids end up teaching and mentoring younger ones. Think of the organizational contortions required to set up things like this in most schools. Of course, I'm not saying that everyone should go to a one-room farm school. My point is that we need a great deal more diversity and that maybe policy should support this instead of trying to fix everything the same way (or even at all).
People will cry out about the risks of destandardization but really, if you stop to think about it, kids want to learn. Passionately. They're hard-wired to do it. What we should be asking is not how we can get them to learn but how we ever manage to program the desire out of them. Personal anecdote: when my daughter was in the third grade (and had a teacher she loved), she would get up in the morning and literally jump for joy that she was going to school. I don't mean little bunny hops... I mean she would jump up and down bigtime and sing "I'm going to schooooool!" Just a short time later (after the teacher she loved was fired and not even allowed to say goodbye to the class... different story) a pallor that I can only call depression came over her about everything associated with school. It took years for signs of intellectual excitement to return.