Excellent points and I agree completely. They're also already in pretty deep with respect to privatization. Since (at least one of) the curriculum publishers

Excellent points and I agree completely. They're also already in pretty deep with respect to privatization. Since (at least one of) the curriculum publishers and standardized testing boards (eg: Edexcel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edexcel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edexcel) is privately owned. That leads to tremendous investment in lobbying and special interest type stuff, but actually takes away an individual teacher's ability to tailor the curriculum to the interests of the students.