I agree that good inner-city schools often improve character before they improve academic growth. But that's a good first step, right? Even if all you do is get the kid to work hard, value education, and graduate, even though their test scores won't go up, won't their children and their community value education that much more? And then you've set the stage for the next steps that you were talking about. You've began to make that culture change.
I said in the previous comment that I appreciate Finland. But honestly, I would want much more radical than even Finland. Finland is a good first step, especially in increasing teacher prestige, training, and autonomy, but some of the policies that Alfie Kohn describes - such as eliminating grades in favor of very specific skill-based and instructive
ipsative assessments - will take another step entirely. But they are necessary. I do know some schools internationally that have eliminated grades, and there are probably a few in America, so it can be done.
You are right that many calls for reform are in their infancy and thus rather vague, but in my time in international educator conferences I have gotten the opportunity to see people making meaningful reforms that can be replicated. One reasonable start that can be incorporated into American schools is the "
Flipped Classroom" model. It can't automatically make the teacher creative and the students inquisitive, but it does provide MUCH more room for such to happen. I interned at one school that had been doing flipped classroom for decades (without calling it that) and it was a brilliant concept. That was pre-internet, but now the ease of accessible video instruction makes the concept that much easier.
Another very helpful concept is
Productive Failure, which I ironically spoke quite a bit about with
Manu Kapur while he was working in Singapore (even if there's a lot of things in Singapore that we don't want to emulate, it does sound like they're open to experimentation and change). Kapur's experiments in teaching kids to be willing to tackle open-ended problems that could result in failure reminded me immediately of the
legendary Wired article about what Sergio Juárez Correa did in Mexico, which is still such an insane story that I keep waiting for the fraud to be exposed.
I can attest from personal experience that a lot is possible. It's been over a decade since I was in a traditional classroom - during that time I've focused more on mentoring youth and working in non-traditional settings: prison, homeless kids, dropouts, slums, etc. Recently I've focused on just basic literacy - how much more difficult is it for a person to ever educate themselves if they can't even read? And simply by following some pretty simple rules - everything is investigative, all instruction is learner-focused rather than instructor-focused, all evaluation is ipsative - I've seen literally hundreds of people learn to read who had been considered illiterate, often drop-outs who didn't think they could do school at all. And in every one of these cases it was on a purely voluntary basis - I was getting inmates and street kids and dropouts to come of their own free will and learn, because they actually felt good about what they were doing, were using their minds effectively, and saw that they were making process.
It really can be done, if we take time to figure out the right ways to do it and commit to them.
Didn't tear them down or anything. 
I'll let current residents speak more on that. 
.
, that means you are getting desperate
