Who exactly is going to teach children to build rockets and robots? As a country we have pretty much run all the vocational teachers out of the schools. The vocational teachers were good because most did contracting during the summer. Add to this the decline in schools teaching programming[1]. We need to figure a way to get qualified technical / vocational people back into the schools and realize that they need to paid more because of demand in their field.

Standardized tests suck, but they suck less than every other way we have to measure schools in a country-wide manner.

[1] I am wondering where the next generation of programmers is going to come from.