Emergency in education across the USA

Hi. I am just checking in this morning to remind all the hopefully to be elected politicans and the other world be pundits of the world that we have a world class emergency on our hands.
Put simply, the world has morphed so fast in almost every aspect of fuctioning and by this I mean global economics, information age technology, cultural transformations and migrations and upheavals and overturning of long thought sacrosanct values and beliefs, that it has become imprerative for individuals and systems (if they want to be effective) to update and get ahead of this curve or wave of change.

If the medium is the message, today catacliysmic, rapid and unexpected forms of change is both the meduim and the message. Today's educational systems do not prepare individuals to deal with this kind of world. They are stuck in a "control"
"teacher knows best" "do as I say and I tell you when you have it right" mode. Even thought there is much research and rhetoric about "students based learning" and "teaching to the whole child" as well as curriulla models like Understanding by Design that analyse important factors and plan for the aquisition of nessesary skills and abilities, these models are under utilized and not even well understood by most educators who are too busy getting kids ready for tests that are designed by folks who are still thinking in the last decade.

The results are clear and observabe. Our population is poorly educated and we are having trouble competing in world markets with countries that have identified this problem and already begun to remediate.

Someone has to shake some trees in Washington and in evey local school district. Smart kids are graduating because they are smart but not nessesarily becasue they have been instructed in a "smart" way. Don't believe that your school district is so great just because all the students go to college. There in is the next problem which I call the dummy down college syndrome or "if beer makes you smart then we are all geniuses here. But that is a blog for another day.

Please respond.