NCLB (teaching to tests) kills creativity. But politicians will never change this model because . . .

creativity cannot be strictly defined or measured.

If you can't measure it you can't test for it.
If you can't test for it you can't force accountability.
Without accountability you can't show value for the taxpayer.

Without ability to show value (or lack of it) you can't push a political agenda (pro-schools or pro-vouchers).

And why just pick on the public schools? Private schools, for the most part, follow the same structured "stand and deliver in the classroom" model . . . with similar results.

Home schooling quality varies widely . . . the choice of teacher (teacher training and experience) is often limited ;-) I've seen some horrible home schooling situations and some great ones.

We're blessed to have excellent public schools here . . . we have open enrollment and charter schools, so there's healthy competition among schools and it generally raises the bar for all. Public schools lose state aid when they lose students, so they work hard to keep them.

There are privates, a few with slightly different models (Montessori, for example, but elements of Montessori have been worked into most early childhood classrooms). Private high schools are nearly all structured the same as public.

My kids used special needs services, and those generally don't exist at the same level at the privates. Public schools were, by far, the best choice for my children. Both completed K-12 and moved on to top colleges. I'm happy, and as they are A students at excellent colleges, they feel they were better prepared than their peers (many of whom attended private schools) to succeed at the post secondary level.

In general people like to point to schools as the source of whatever ails the child (it's the easiest place to put the blame). The truth is that most learning occurs outside of school, and the most important brain development takes place between age 0-5 -- before most formal schooling begins (in the US).

Schools can't kill creativity if the child is engaged in creative activities outside of school . . . which is more than half their time anyway (and summers are a great time to run with creative endeavors). If the child is sitting in front of a TV or playing mindless video games on their "off" time they will become zombies.

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Funniest Biology book ever written.

Public schooling may not entirely kill the creativity in a child, so much as prohibit the creativity from blossoming in select areas.

For an obvious example of creativity, one can look to visual art. Public school art programs around the country are diminishing in funds and attention, as acceptance for "effort" is growing. Children are being taught that creativity is always something easy, which, in my opinion, parallels nonexistence.

Another example is in the composition of papers and essays. Children are taught how to write for the sole purpose of passing essay questions on tests.
Intro (Thesis)
Body
Body
Body
Conclusion.
This format is clearly the nationwide simple standard, and can be useful up to a certain age.
When my 12th grade AP Literature and Composition class teaches this, however, personal feelings tell me that something is very wrong. This simple essay structure is only the tip of the problematic iceberg, as it is usually coupled with identical structure in each paragraph, repetitive sentence structure, etc.
Personally, I am an avid reader, and have always been. What I pin as my own creativity (in writing), I can attribute to my outside reading and two teachers throughout my school career who have made it their personal gaol to fuel all students to excel outside of any box.

I feel there are more questions to be asked here:
To what extent do school systems simply fail to feed childrens' creativity?
Is this failure, in effect, homogenous to killing creativity?

Submitted for stipulation:

1. The US has substantially more productive creativity by percentage of population than any other nation.
2. We are and have been in an information economy for the last 30-50 years.
3. Success in information economy depends almost entirely on education.
4. Education must be broadly available across income and social classes to avoid "too-early" selection of "stars" who will simply represent groupthink of the selectors (see Europe, Japan).
5. There are indeed basics for entry into the information economy (reading, writing, technology, etc.) and there are time-tested ways of teaching those that survive the fads...and occasionally take good tips from fads to improve overall. If these basics are not transmitted, the potential creativity will likely be lost.
6. Transmitting those "basics" very broadly involves spending a lot of money on ensuring equality and offering special ed services to get people who are otherwise perfectly able to creatively contribute to a basic level needed for interaction with the economy. (Note: next frontier is figuring out city schools. Tom's theory is "Make them tiny").
7. Learning basics is boring to human beings, especially children...especially children who are brought up to believe that they are incredibly special (part of the Creativity plan).
8. The plethora of private schools are constantly testing the boundaries of our "accepted" public school solutions, on both sides: more basics and more freedom. We have to watch out for the self-selecting nature of these school populations, but the experiments truly improve our overall schools.
9. A lot of the "crushing my soul" stuff we read is the equivalent of someone who wants to be Itzhak Perlman without learning how to read music. Those people who complain would simply die under some of the school systems we've been asked to emulate.

Conclusion: Our schools (including our college system) are in fact primarily oriented towards optimizing for productive creativity compared to those of other cultures/nations.

While I agree almost entirely with your post, there are a few areas in which I feel we will inevitably disagree:
1. I had actually considered this when writing my last post, and I am sure that it is true, however I do feel that even though the United States may be 'winning,' being in the lead is not synonymous with good performance in this case (you can win a race crawling if everyone else is asleep).
2. We have definitely been growing as an information economy, but we are quickly growing too dependent on raw information, rather than human beings (OPINION).
3. You must define success. If we continue to head towards information dependence in this fashion, and sustain increasing sacrifice to keep up with our neighbors (see Europe, Japan), how will we ever match them without sacrificing what they have already abandoned? Also, what would we really have gained?
4. Also true, it would be extremely hard to grow more specific to each child without falling into the trap of an "effort" mentality, where there is zero accountability.
5. You are correct in that if I were never taught the simplest essay structure, I would never know that I had to expand to greater things to excel.
6. I enjoy the "Make them tiny" theory. Somewhere exists a perfect balance between a public and private school. Lack of resources is a huge issue.
7. I have never found basics boring... the first time around. Even second and third times, basics are interesting. It is when basics begin spill into where the next step should be that problems exist. This could go on, but I'm sure you can see where it would end up (lack of resources once again).
8. Yes, and I believe that anyone reading this is part of a larger experiment than that, considering that public education of such a grand scale is relatively very young. Any current issues with the system have not been around long enough to sustain a harsh judgement. It is an evolutionary process, and we are the beginning.
9. I agree with this so much, and it somewhat relates with what I said in response to 5. Paralleling what I just said in 8, this whole thing is a process. There is a stage right now where it appears that creativity itself (or the general public's perception of creativity) has been held up as an idol for conformity.

Conclusion: Agree.
My Consclusion: America can only swallow creativity to a certain degree, but as long as we can have these conversations, the Man is doing something right. In terms of the US education system, I would have to say that it parallels democracy:
"It's garbage, but it's the best."