Actually, very few American schools ever fully adopted Dewey’s ideas. But in fact, some of his ideas work very well for some types of students in some types of learning situations. The big problem facing U.S. schooling today is our continuing effort to have a one-size-fits-all policy for all schools and all students. NCLB is not only largely a failure, but has had a negative impact on many schools and students.
Bottom line? More choice, vouchers, charter schools, and less federal meddling.
My Master's degree is in instructional design and educational technology. It is not the schools that adopt Dewey's ideas. It is the curriculum designers and the text book writers. It happens way before it gets to the schools. All the schools can do is decided between one Dewey-inspired textbook or another Dewey-inspired textbook.
This is why I agree completely with your conclusion that home schooling, vouchers and independent charter schools that use independent, individually chosen source materials and curricula are extremely important.
And the original intent of getting control of education away from the Feds and unions and back to the communities and parents is essential, too. That's where they'll start teaching real reading with phonics and real mathematics with multiplication tables, etc... the way some of us learned as late as the 60s before "New Math" killed off a lot of learning.