How to escape education's death valley

Here are my favorite parts:

• To understand the legislation No Child Left Behind is to understand irony.
• No Child Left Behind should have been named Many Children Left Behind.
• In some parts of the country the drop out rate is 60%. In the Native American communities it is 80%.
• If we could half the drop out rate, some say that it would create a net-gain to the US economy over ten years of nearly a trillion dollars. 
• Some kids are physical absent from school while others are physically present but have mentally already dropped out.
• Too often teachers end up labouring and students end up enduring a culture of education that contradicts how human life flourishes.
• Human beings are naturally different and diverse.
• We have a very narrow definition of education.
• The basics are necessary but not sufficient. 
• Does ADHD exist? Maybe. Is it an epidemic? Probably not.
• If you sit kids down, hour after hour, doing low-grade clerical work, don't be surprised if they start to fidget.
• Too often we mistake childhood for a psychological disorder.
• Kids prosper best with a broad curriculum that celebrates their various talents. 
• The arts aren't important just because they increase math scores. They are important because they speak to parts of children's being which are otherwise untouched.
• Children are natural leaners.
• It's a real achievement to snuff out a child's natural tendency to be curious.
• Curiosity is the engine of achievement.
• There is a popular movement to de-professionalize teachers.
• Teaching is a creative profession. Teaching properly conceived is not a delivery system.
• Great teachers mentor, stimulate, engage.
• People can spend an awful lot of time discussing education without ever discussing learning.
• You can be engaged in an activity and not really achieving or doing anything.
• If you are teaching but the students aren't learning, are you really teaching?
• The dominant culture of education does not concern itself with teaching and learning but with testing.
• Standardized tests should be diagnostic. 
• Human life is inherently creative.
• We create and re-create our lives.
• Schools have  adopted a culture of standardization but it doesn't have to be that way.
• It's not just about what's on the test but what's not on the test.
• We have a lot to learn from Finland.
• Spending money on teacher professional development is not an expense -- it's an investment.
• In Finland, they spend six times more every year on teacher professional development than on student assessment and testing.
• Education policies must empower schools to get the job done -- not departments of education and not individual teachers.
• Centralizing education with command and control policies is folly.
• If you remove the discretion of teachers and students and place the power in the hands of distant authorities, education stops working.
• The best teachers are sailing into a headwind, every single day.
• Education is not a mechanical system -- it's a human system. It's about people.
• If we are to save mainstream public education, we are going to need to make it look more like many alternative education programs.
• If we made public education more like alternative education, we wouldn't need alternative education.
• Change the environment and you give life a chance.
• The real challenge for educational leadership is not command and control -- rather, it should be climate control where we create the conditions where real learning and good teaching are most likely to flourish.