To fix US schools, panel says, start over

A bipartisan group of scholars and business leaders, school chancellors and education commissioners, and former cabinet secretaries and governors, declare that America's public education system, designed to meet the needs of 100 years ago when the workplace revolved around an assembly line, is unsuited to today's global marketplace.

In its place, the group proposes a series of controversial reforms:
• Offer universal pre-kindergarten programs and opportunities for continuing
education for adults without high school diplomas.
• Create state board exams that students could pass at age 16 to move either on to community college or to a university-level high school curriculum.
• Improve school salaries in exchange for reducing secure pension benefits, and pay teachers more to work with at-risk kids, for longer hours, or for high performance.
• Create curriculums that emphasize creativity and abstract concepts over rote learning or mastery of facts.