You did well finding URLs of the two parts of the McKinsey PDFs of April, 2009. Your knowledge of the content indicates that you are a fast reader or already knew about the materials.

We have at most trivial disagreement on facts. We likely have some unresolvable disagreements on politics.

In a post below, you went on and on with a lot of what I called "nonsense": Do such work as well as you please, and the results will still be nonsense. Sorry: That direction just gets deeper and deeper into stuff for which there is no reasonable solution.

You seem to have some quite broad educational objectives: Those promise to be very expensive and have highly mixed results, e.g., a gigantic waste of time for any very capable student.

We should agree: For the main academic subjects, such as considered in the McKinsey study, etc., it really is possible to have standardized tests that really are in practice essentially the best measure of learning. Indeed, that you take seriously the McKinsey analysis of the results of just such tests implies that you agree.

Are such tests perfect? No. Better than anything else widely available? Yes.

From my experience, the tests of the US Educational Testing Service are about the best measures of learning in K-12 and at least early college academic subjects. The test results are well respected for admissions to both college and graduate school. Net, these tests are a good resource for an effort to make progress in the US educational system.

Okay, have various paths to education. Have classrooms, special education, private schools, guided home schooling, etc. Fine. But, for all the paths, evaluate the learning with accepted, well designed tests, e.g., from ETS. So, the various paths have the same measure, the test scores, and much the same, real educational goals; so, the paths are in competition. GOOD.

Have all the paths you want, but for my kids I'd home school them with the goal of having them be ready for college work by age 10-12 and graduate work about three years later and having them do some research, publish some papers, take GREs, use those and the published papers to get accepted to grad school, take the qualifying exams, submit the published papers as the dissertation, and, thus, after less than two months on campus, one year later get a Ph.D. and to HECK with more in academic education. Only one degree -- Ph.D. Period. We're talking cutting out lots of expensive, time-wasting, psychologically wacko nonsense from nearly irrelevant down to totally upchuck-able.

E.g., some girl 13 gets to concentrate on learning calculus and not her hair style, doing well in her education and not gossip and social climbing.

For your main struggles and concerns, I outlined a simple, special path to the tests that should please you:

"Here we cut out a lot of nonsense: If someone wants to learn, then sit in a cubicle with a computer, work through some of the best educational materials, take the test, and see how well they do, and then all the credit and/or blame is just theirs."

The "nonsense" I'm talking about you described with lots of references: As I mentioned, in that direction the swamp just gets deeper thicker with no hope.

Here's how this simple, special path addresses many of your concerns: As we know, on the Internet, no one can tell if you are a dog, nerd, wearing pajamas, blond, brunette, red head, white, black, brown, yellow, Christian, Jew, Muslim, African, Northern European, Russian, Mideastern, Asian, Hispanic, etc., rich, poor, handicapped, handsome, ugly, too thin, too fat, popular, socially awkward or if you are living with 1, 2 parents, natural or not, previously were an academic success or failure, were good or bad at other academic subjects, were good or bad at athletics, what your sex or age is, are pregnant or have been pregnant, have a bad reputation from siblings that went before, have an address in a good or bad neighborhood, etc. So, study the materials via the Internet, take the tests, submit the scores, and totally avoid any issues about social this and that. Don't look for a simpler solution.

Yes, the cry will go up: "But, but, but, this is too narrow and omits oceans of adult face time just so totally CRUCIAL for social and civics maturations ....". Yup, and also even more crucial for the teachers unions, really high real estate taxes, nearly meaningless or wasteful and even devastating social and athletic, but not academic, competition, making a king and queen out of the quarterback and head cheerleader and social serfs out of everyone else, degenerate pop culture, bullying, etc. That system IS especially good for getting all the students started on drugs and getting the sixth and seventh grade girls sexually active.

Besides, here are some facts of life about learning, especially relevant on Hacker News: Mostly people, for their careers and everything else, have to keep learning all their lives. Nearly all of this learning is self-directed, self-taught, and pursued independently or largely so. In particular, for all of the history of the US computer industry, nearly all the learning in the labor force has been self-taught -- assembler, Fortran, Cobol, APL, PL/I, Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming, SQL, C, C++, Dijkstra semaphores, communicating sequential processes, the fast Fourier transform, Java, HTML, MemCache, .NET, etc. So, students who can, should get started on such learning ASAP.

Yes, next the cry will go up: "But, but, but, what about students who for any of a long list of reasons would fall through the cracks and, thus, create problems for decades for themselves and the rest of society? These students need the help of good teaching."

Fine: I did indicate that there should be multiple paths to the tests.

We can't hope to make much progress arguing with the teachers unions or by pursuing arguments about nature versus nurture or genetics. So, for the whole debate, the whole issue, we need to get some clarity, simplicity, alternatives, and competition. So, for these ends, start with some good tests, e.g., from ETS. Then have multiple, competitive paths to the tests. In particular, one of the paths should be very high quality learning materials available via the Internet.

For the teachers unions, let's get to see how well their students do on the tests against students with home schooling and the Internet!

Or, for an example, if want to take part of the movie at the intended face value, then consider the students and parents so eager to get the students into charter schools: Such eagerness should serve well for a student with a computer, using high quality materials on the Internet, working through the materials, doing the exercises, taking the tests right along, AND seeing right then how well they did.

Look, guys: How to learn such material just ain't too obscure: The learning is NOT a spectator sport; all that's required is just working through the material which should be easy enough for any eager student or for any student with determined parents! "Sandra, do well on the test on integration by parts and THEN you can gossip with your friends, go shopping for a new dress, and watch your chick flick. Do really well and you can get two new dresses and two chick flicks. No, you can't go park until 3 AM with that college boy you met at McDonald's.".

E.g., nearly everyone on Hacker News worked through Kernighan and Ritchie with its overly succinct writing, sparse content, the tortured, obscure, idiosyncratic syntax of C, no details on the internals of malloc(), way too little detail on stack usage and its storage usage, too little in exercises, no tests right along, no final test at the quality level of the ETS, and still got it. The required learning work just ain't too difficult. We know we can do such work, for C, high school and college math, science, languages, history, etc.

Let's cut the nonsense, see the tests, prepare for the tests, get on to more, and cut out all the social this and political that.