As for the shift needed in the culture of education, I totally agree. There needs to be a shift in accountability for the students, their families, and for schools. While there were parents who hoped their kids would do well at the school where I taught, there was a pervasive home attitude of school will get you nowhere. Many of the kids had no role models in their life where they could see any value to education. One VP I knew, in a neighboring district, married into a poorer latino family. They valued hard work, but only really understood hard manual labor type efforts. He was constantly hounded as he was going through schooling by them. "Why are you wasting this time at school? Why are you not doing more to provide for my daughter? Go get a real job." After finally becoming a teacher and then a VP and making more money than any other member of the family he married into, they started to see how education could be an investment. I don't know how you do that on a scale where the majority of socio-economically depressed families and communities can be exposed to the value of education.
Funny how being told to perform physical activity is seen as punishment, but having to perform complex mental activities isn't.
Sadly, the biggest issue I see is that they want school to be, basically, training for a job and real life. So, since you'll never solve a system of equation on a job (or so they believe), they don't see why it should be taught. But, yeah, that's not getting into accountability issues with students and their families. It's a frustrating cycle, and is likely going to push me from teaching before too much longer.
Basically, grades were instead of pushups. We did good overall, but when it comes to homework with no punishment for not being done, people skipped it.
He proposed that students should watch lectures at home with a few problems for familiarity, and that classroom time should be spent working through problems in a guided environment. This allows students to pause, rewind, rewatch, etc. the lectures and move at their own pace, while getting expert guidance on the problems in person (and not relying on parents who may not have even looked at the source material in decades).