I think a lot of people miss why we need a massive improvement in education.  As a civilization, our knowledge and understanding increase year to year, but instruction time stays constant.  The basic level of understanding needed to perform most non-menial jobs is skyrocketing, but we're still getting a constant number of learning-hours.  It's not just "oh, we need students to score 10% better", but rather "we need to compress 17 years of current education into 13, because next decade, we'll need those college years to teach people about the new stuff".  If we want to graduate and employ well-rounded and well-trained citizens, we have to make education more efficient just to keep up year-to-year.