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From watching the process of education since 2000, I see a clear trend.  Teachers are trained to dispense information pertinent to a test.  They are expected to only oversee a canned, state-approved, set of standards which can be measured on a specific, state-administered test.   Progress is slow.  Standards add a little information at a time each year without regard to growth spurts in the brain or in the socialization process.  Tests, therefore, are particularly repetitious.  Students who have decided that their education has left their interests out of the equation or has ignored their acumen in an area not tested are viewed in a negative light by the state. If they choose not to understand the information drummed into a classroom's airwaves one year at a time, 13 years in a row, K-12, they are deemed as at-risk and have to endure extra tutoring. In reality, they have chosen not to participate in trying to understand a subject that has no relevance to interest or acumen.

It is so sad to see the schools of education at colleges training students to be guardians of a daycare system for children ages 5-18 instead of training students to teach information pertinent to advancing knowledge in the plethora of fields that make the economy, our health, our technical and scientific prowess, and our rights as a society vibrant and enduring from one generation to another.  What a travesty for the government to create and support a system to spend millions of dollars for the mere rating of school districts and teachers on success as measured by one test based on a set of standards that doesn't have much relation to what makes money, what heals the body, what advances society in technology and science, or what manages our rights.

In case Facebook and Instagram, Flickr and Picasa, Photoshop storyboards, and Facetime and Skype are not wake-up calls to education, then education needs to know it will die a fairly quick death beginning in the year 2017.  Reading and writing will not lead the way to a better life.  Numbers will.  Already, those who know technology and programming make more money than those who know how to read and write.  Those who can understand making an app are much more employable than those who can get the main idea of a written story or who can recount details of a multiparagraph essay.

We need a system that is, first and foremost, relevant to society's needs.  We need a system that pays attention to what happens with the development of the brain.  We need a system that is dynamic, individual, and that gives a true mastery of knowledge (at an 80% level or higher).  We need a system that finishes such mastery in a short period of time rather than extended over a 13-year period for the sake of those who choose not to learn.  A person at 16 can master every subject that is currently in place.  Students aged 18 are not children and should already have begun the integration process into the larger society, not be chaperoned by guardians of a daycare.  We need a system that actively uses available technology and that seeks to move that technology to the next step in its evolution.  We need a system that rewards the accumulation and advancement of knowledge rather than a system that tries to manage socialization equitably and piecemeal knowledge at a pace that dulls the senses.

Of course, these thoughts are at conflict with the current caretakers of public and private education.  But the years of 2020 and beyond will require knowledge of a very different nature from our young people than the current system is capable of offering.