Need to rip system apart "a ruinous fiction"

I highly, highly recommend Professor Jack Schneider's piece in the Atlantic on the fiction of everything in American education being broken:

American education has some obvious shortcomings. Even defenders of the schools can make long lists of things they’d like to change. But the root of the problem is not incompetent design, as is so frequently alleged. Nor is it stasis. Rather, it is the twofold challenge of complexity and scale. American schools are charged with the task of creating better human beings. And they are expected to do so in a relatively consistent way for all of young people. It is perhaps the nation’s most ambitious collective project; as such, it advances slowly.

No sample can do it justice, though, so please do read it all.