3) Improve public schools.
My answer, absolutely destroy the public schools.
No, that is not the answer. Limiting educational opportunities was long the chosen method by which the Church and state controlled the populace, if you can not read you have to take the word of the person who can, usually the local Govt. officials or Priest.
Public secular education was started in dark ages France when the King realized that he needed people who could read and write to properly administer his kingdom, but if he relied on the Church he could never trust their loyalty, in the event of a dispute between King and Pope their loyalty would go to the source of their education.
The answer to the problem is to eliminate "tenure" among teachers. The rest of us are subject to being fired for poor quality work, why should teachers be any different ? Perhaps if teachers were held responsible for the test results of their students they would return to the proven method of teaching HOW to think and quit trying to teach WHAT to think.
Locally we have a socialist activist "Professor" at a local college who writes a weekly column in the news paper, this past monday he mentioned that many in the area have proposed an end to tenure and went on to spend many column inches talking about educators and dissent, what he failed to mention was that if he spent more time teaching and less time dissenting his students would be better qualified for their jobs.
PHD = Piled Higher and Deeper