Though I don't need the rhetoric, this hits it on the head, in every aspect.
I'd like to try teaching math like English -- Math 1, Math 2, Math 3, Math 4, with curriculum determined in part by such apparently meaningless factors as what might be useful in other classes or what's happening, you know, outside of my room.
The textbook comments are particularly right on -- step 1, burn them. If teachers complain that they won't know what to teach, fire them on the spot.
Geometry is also a lousy place for proof. Teach deduction all the time, in every topic -- and in classrooms other than math. "Here's a bunch of fake stuff you don't know anything about that's hard to draw. Now let's think really abstractly about how we're thinking about it!" And induction doesn't get taught at all.
The practical deal-killer, the one that drove me out of the profession, is that the barrel full of math teachers is so close to empty that you're pretty much scraping bottom from day 1. This kind of instruction -- and this kind of critique -- can only originate with someone who likes math, and is sort of good at it. You'd be amazed (or maybe you wouldn't) at how few public high school math teachers this describes.
America has gotten the math teaching instruction it asked for when it decided to prop up bad teachers with lousy but easy-to-use texts, and to boot it got the benefit of not having to pay very well for people willing to go through these motions. (It's not about money, but really, it's a little bit about money. I doubled my salary when I left last year.) It's a big, huge problem, and since you're going to have to convince parents that it needs the kind of dramatic overhaul this (great) article describes, and since parents were largely victimized by the existing system, I'm pretty sure it's a losing battle.
